Do Scale

Do Scale Plot Summary

Introduction

Many business leaders talk about wanting to scale their organizations, but most have a confused understanding of what this truly means and how to achieve it. Scaling is not simply rapid growth or expanding operations - it's developing a sustainable ability to grow systematically to whatever size your market will allow. The concept often gets mistaken for mere expansion, when in reality it requires fundamental shifts in leadership approaches and organizational structures. This strategic roadmap addresses three critical aspects of scalability. First, it clarifies what true scaling means versus other forms of growth, helping leaders make informed decisions about their business trajectory. Second, it explores the essential mindset shifts required of founders and executives, moving beyond instinctual management to data-driven systems. Finally, it presents a practical framework for implementing high-quality team-based decision making - the mechanical foundation upon which sustainable scalability is built.

Chapter 1: Understanding True Scaling vs. Mere Growth

Scaling and growth are terms often used interchangeably in business conversations, but they represent fundamentally different concepts. True scaling refers to the ability to sustainably grow an organization to whatever size its industry allows in chosen market segments. This isn't just about getting bigger; it's about developing systematic capabilities that enable exponential rather than linear growth. The distinction becomes clear when examining the growth curves. Linear growth produces a steady upward line when measured over time - each unit of input (time, money, resources) yields a proportional unit of output. Scaling, however, creates a J-curve or hockey stick pattern, where market share accelerates exponentially relative to inputs. The primary focus of scaling is maximizing market share sustainably over the shortest achievable time span, while organic growth typically prioritizes other metrics like profitability, quality, or employee satisfaction. A defining characteristic of scalable organizations is their relentless pursuit of market share as the primary objective. This doesn't mean completely abandoning other important business goals, but it does require recognizing that these become secondary considerations. The one exception is the sustainability parameter - for commercial enterprises, this means profitability; for non-profits, it means maintaining positive cash flow. Without this parameter, growth becomes unsustainable regardless of its trajectory. When visualizing scalability for your organization, it's helpful to create a specific "Scale Vision" statement. This succinct declaration identifies your target market segments, timeframe, and growth objectives. For example: "We will scale our customer support technology to serve the North American healthcare market, reaching $50 million in revenue within three years." This becomes your North Star, guiding all decisions on the journey to scale. The choice between scaling and organic growth isn't trivial - it reflects fundamental values and strategic priorities. Organizations committed to scaling will optimize operations, systems, and culture around maximizing market share, while those pursuing organic growth maintain flexibility to prioritize other values. Neither approach is inherently superior, but clarity about which path you're on prevents strategic confusion and misalignment.

Chapter 2: Overcoming the Mystical Founder Myth

The business world perpetuates two harmful myths that can derail scalability efforts. The first is the Myth of the Magical Startup - the notion that early-stage companies possess unique qualities that should be maintained indefinitely. The second is the Myth of the Mystical Founder - the belief that successful organizational leaders have superhuman capabilities that cannot be systematized or replicated. These myths are particularly dangerous because they contradict the reality of sustainable scaling. With an 80% failure rate, startups are actually a terrible source of role models for business success. The only valid strategy for a startup is to stop being one. Many startup characteristics that enable initial traction - like constant pivoting, saying yes to everything, and making lightning-fast decisions based on limited information - become actively destructive when attempting to scale. Similarly, the founder mythology creates unrealistic expectations about leadership. Our perceptions of famous founders are shaped largely by promotional narratives designed to sell books and generate publicity. These stories emphasize dramatic moments and visionary insights while downplaying the mundane reality: scaling is built on consistent implementation of systems and processes, not heroic individual efforts. A crucial distinction exists between the external and internal founder roles. Externally, founders may project certainty, unwavering conviction, and singular authority - this serves marketing purposes. Internally, however, scale-minded founders must work collegially with leadership teams, embrace uncertainty, and rarely invoke "the founder's card" to override collaborative decisions. The more founders confuse these roles, the more they hamper scalability. For leaders serious about scaling, this means adopting a clear-eyed perspective: don't believe the startup hype, find your market quickly, be selective about which startup traits to maintain, use the external founder persona sparingly for marketing purposes, and minimize using founder status to force through decisions internally. Sustainable scaling requires moving beyond the mystique to embrace systematic approaches to growth.

Chapter 3: Taming the Golden Gut: Data-Driven Decision Making

Early business success often stems from what's called "visceral management" - leaders making decisions based on gut instinct. This approach combines knowledge, experience, insight, and execution capability to produce quick judgments that guide the organization. During initial growth phases, this works remarkably well, as most decisions require readily available information and can be made unilaterally by one person. However, as organizations grow more complex, visceral management becomes increasingly problematic. First, anecdotal information ceases to be a reliable proxy for data. When a sales manager mentions that "three customers complained about our product this week," this might accurately reflect a problem in a small business, but becomes statistically meaningless in a scaled operation. Second, information proliferates beyond what any individual can process. The needed data exists in databases, reports, and communications scattered throughout the organization, making it impossible for even the sharpest mind to access everything relevant to major decisions. The most significant shift involves moving from unilateral to multilateral decision-making. In early-stage organizations, most decisions can be made by individuals working independently. As complexity increases, no single person possesses all the knowledge required for high-quality decisions. This transition proves especially challenging for founders who built their success on autonomy and self-reliance. Their desire for freedom - the very trait that made them successful entrepreneurs - now becomes a liability. To successfully scale, leaders must develop five golden rules for taming their "golden gut." First, assume you never know everything required for high-quality decisions; always ask what information you might be missing. Second, recognize that you can no longer make major decisions unilaterally; identify who else needs to be involved. Third, systematically codify and store information for easy retrieval, preventing the temptation to revert to instinct-based decisions. Fourth, decentralize decision-making by pushing authority outward and downward. Finally, continue trusting your intuition and execution capabilities, but only while constantly updating your knowledge and experience base. This transformation represents one of the most difficult psychological adjustments for entrepreneurial leaders. After years of success through independent action and quick judgment, they must embrace a more methodical, collaborative approach. The alternative is increasingly poor decisions that threaten everything they've built.

Chapter 4: Building Your Decision-Making Machine

The single most important development for scaling any organization is the creation of a robust decision-making machine. This isn't some arcane technology but rather a systematized approach to how information flows and decisions are made. The foundation of this machine is, surprisingly, your organizational chart - not the aspirational version gathering dust in a file somewhere, but a functional structure that accurately reflects how work gets done. To transform your org chart into an effective decision-making machine, you must first conduct a thorough reality check. Identify anything that's simply wrong - positions that don't match actual authority relationships, ambiguous reporting lines with confusing dotted-line relationships, or reporting structures that seemed logical but aren't working. Then identify what's missing - both roles you currently need and positions you'll require as you scale. This cleansing process creates the structural foundation for scalable decision-making. Next, redefine job specifications by shifting from "heads" to "hats." In early-stage organizations, roles typically revolve around what specific individuals actually do, regardless of formal descriptions. Scalability requires defining positions based on what the organization needs, independent of current incumbents. This shift enables conversations about restructuring without making them personal attacks on individuals - you're discussing the hat, not the head wearing it. Information flow forms the third critical component. Identify your top metrics and information sources, ensuring they come from trusted, proven sources. Establish clear protocols for information storage, distribution, and updating to prevent the common scenario where executives arrive at meetings with competing versions of the same data. The single biggest improvement usually involves moving away from email as an information management tool toward purpose-built collaboration software. Finally, rationalize your meetings inventory by categorizing gatherings into two types: planning meetings where you discuss what you're going to do, and review meetings where you evaluate what happened. Most organizations accumulate meetings haphazardly over time, creating inefficiencies and redundancies. A structured approach organizes meetings by horizon of focus - from daily operational discussions to annual strategic planning - ensuring each serves a distinct purpose in the decision-making machine.

Chapter 5: From Vertical to Horizontal: Creating Scalable Leadership

The transition from organic growth to scaling requires a fundamental shift in management approach - from vertical to lateral management. In early growth stages, managers are appointed primarily to reduce the number of direct reports for leaders above them. Their success is measured by how well they manage their teams, make decisions within their domains, and deliver results for their departments. This vertical orientation serves organizations well during initial growth. However, as complexity increases, a new capability becomes essential: lateral management. This means managers must make decisions not just for their own departments but for the good of the entire enterprise. They must collaborate effectively with peers, balance competing priorities across functional boundaries, and subordinate departmental interests to organizational needs. This transformation doesn't come naturally - it requires conscious development of new skills and mindsets. The foundation of lateral management is what can be called the Enterprise Commitment: "When working in a team or group environment, I will place the interests of the enterprise ahead of my own." This seemingly simple twenty-word statement represents a profound shift in orientation. Organizations serious about scaling should make this commitment explicit, displaying it prominently and beginning key meetings with its recitation until it becomes ingrained in the culture. Another key concept is internal customer service. During early growth, organizations focus almost exclusively on external customers. As complexity increases, leaders must recognize that their colleagues become crucial internal customers whose needs must be met for the organization to function effectively. For example, the IT department serves marketing by maintaining website functionality and sales by supporting CRM systems. Understanding these internal service relationships becomes essential for lateral management. Perhaps most importantly, organizations must develop explicit protocols for decision-making. This includes clear standards for information preparation, discussion parameters, and decision methods. Will decisions be made by consensus, majority vote, or executive decision? Establishing these protocols in advance prevents the endless cycling of discussions that plagues many growing organizations. After decisions are made, "dollar-bill management" requires all team members to support them publicly, regardless of personal opinions. The team should be so aligned that no one could slip a dollar bill between their positions.

Chapter 6: Implementing High-Quality Team-Based Decision Making

High-Quality Team-Based Decision Making (HQTBDM) represents the fundamental shift required to move from organic growth to sustainable scaling. During early growth, organizations succeed through a pattern of saying "yes" to everything, then "flockballing" - throwing every available resource at problems to deliver results through sheer determination. This creates a culture that celebrates heroic individual efforts and generates compelling stories of the organization's early triumphs. However, this approach eventually breaks down as complexity increases. The organization reaches a stage called "Whitewater," where the previous methods of making and executing decisions no longer work effectively. Mistakes proliferate, balls get dropped, and it becomes clear that a systematic overhaul is needed. Leaders must decide whether to revert to a smaller, simpler organizational state or push forward to develop new capabilities for managing complexity. Choosing the path to scalability means reversing the decision-making patterns that worked during early growth. Instead of individuals making unilateral decisions quickly based on readily available information and anecdotal evidence, teams must make collective decisions more deliberately based on systematically gathered data. The transition involves four key reversals: from individual to team-based decisions, from seamless to separate implementation processes, from fast to measured decision-making (to enable faster implementation), and from anecdotal to data-driven insights. To master HQTBDM, leaders must develop both the infrastructure (the decision-making machine discussed earlier) and the collaborative skills needed to operate it effectively. This includes learning to be "ruthlessly constructive" in decision-making meetings - ensuring all voices are heard while maintaining forward momentum. Team members should express their views candidly and passionately within meetings, but maintain absolute unity once decisions are reached. The transformation doesn't happen overnight. It requires sustained attention to building both structures and skills, recognizing that the traits that enabled early success may now be hindrances. Organizations that master this transition develop a powerful competitive advantage - the ability to make consistently high-quality decisions at increasing scale and complexity, enabling them to outperform competitors stuck in heroic leadership models.

Summary

The journey to scalability is ultimately about developing a specific organizational capability: the ability to sustainably grow to whatever size your industry will allow in your chosen market segments. This requires a fundamental shift from instinctual, founder-centered leadership to systematic, team-based decision making. The transition challenges many of the habits and assumptions that drove early success, requiring leaders to relinquish some autonomy in service of building more robust organizational capabilities. Sustainable scaling doesn't happen by accident or through heroic individual efforts. It emerges through the disciplined application of systems that may seem mundane but create extraordinary results. Leaders who successfully navigate this transition recognize that "what got you here won't get you there" - they build decision-making machines that distribute authority appropriately, establish lateral management capabilities, and maintain unwavering focus on enterprise priorities rather than departmental or individual interests. By mastering these principles, organizations develop the capacity for controlled, sustainable growth that outlasts any individual leader.

About Author

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Les McKeown

Les McKeown is the president and CEO of Predictable Success. Les has launched and managed over forty businesses and is the cofounder of an incubation company that helped hundreds of entrepreneurs launch businesses employing thousands worldwide. Since moving to the United States in 1999, Les has helped founder-owners, CEOs, C-level executives, and their teams identify and eliminate personal and organizational barriers to growth.Les lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts, with his wife and two dogs, and receives occasional care packages from his three children.Contact Les at [email protected] and read more at Predictablesuccess.com

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