• Manager - Almost all decisions go through me;
• Me - I get it… and why did you organize the processes this way?
• Manager - Because that’s how I end up being important to the company and they can’t fire me.

This pattern is specific to some generations, partly because the context during their time taught it that way, partly because they grew up in the era of the win-lose—so the struggle was fierce.

These people have a few simple unwritten rules: concentrate, don’t share, don’t spell it out in black and white.

The perfect recipe to make companies shut down.

THE 5 STEPS TO MAKE YOUR PROCESSES SCALABLE

The era of abundant resources is over: now we live in a period of scarcity. So, don’t worry: no one wants to fire you (the company wouldn’t even know how to replace you).

To advance your career, you only need one thing: the productivity of your work must grow continuously.

To achieve this, you need:

1) Eliminate inefficiencies and standardize processes

Wastes and undefined processes cannot be replicated. If something can’t be replicated, it isn’t scalable. If it isn’t scalable, then the value generated is limited by the single individual who runs it. 8 hours a day is too little to scale.

Black death of growth.

Also, this point hits a raw nerve of the centralized person: “if I write down what I do, then anyone can do it.” Or: “I wrote these few lines 15 years of experience and now the newcomer can reach this level by reading these pages.”

Let’s reframe it (like with children): “you’ll never die, because your skills will always remain in the company’s processes.”

Happy? Good (you’re happy, and so is everyone else).

2) Include a mechanism for continuous innovation in all processes

Once step 1 is done, if there isn’t a process of continuous evolution , growth would stabilize at a fixed level. That’s not really the concept of scalability.

Adopt and train your collaborators to use the methods to continuously increase productivity, eliminate waste, solve problems, and innovate processes, products/services, and the business model.

3) Delegate to the right people

The most painful step: delegating the work. After decades of taking on jobs to increase your own importance and the company’s dependency, the day has finally come to hand over your tasks to other people.

The absolute evil.

Find and train the right people to carry out and improve your processes. Thanks to standardization, this phase will be very easy.

4) Have the right management tools

Once everything is set up, there’s only one thing left: governing the process. To do that, you need simple management tools: you don’t need SAP or other expensive, complex management software developed by the various existing software houses.

You can easily govern delegated processes through simple visual management tools like boards (with KPIs, goals, meetings, action plans, etc.), or if you want to do the “PRO”, digitalize the flow of the process with targeted measurement points, but without going overboard: a customized ad-hoc Excel file meets 100% of the needs of any company.

The goal is: you wake up, you check the results on your phone; if they’re green, you go to the beach. If they’re red, you go to the beach anyway, because it’s defined that someone will fix them—and at most you make a phone call to the person responsible (step 3).

5) Continuously grow social capital

Growth depends on the profitability generated and on the sales increase with the same structure, as well as its stability and durability over time. This is possible with the right people—autonomous and able to do it—but it’s even faster if the leadership figures specifically invest in this activity.

To grow the social capital, you need to train your people, keep them updated, develop their thinking skills, and innovate together the business model to achieve their goals, the company’s goals, and yours.

CONCLUSIONS

Don’t keep everything inside: you’ll work more and you won’t grow. Apply the article’s points to move from 1x productivity to 1000x.

This will allow you to transform your revenue per hour from 1k/hour to 10k/hour thanks to the contribution of process scalability—processes that previously depended only on you.