There are two critical elements to running a scalable business:  People and Numbers. We know that a scalable business is one where the owner focuses on developing the capability, capacity and accountability of employees.  But you need numbers to do that. If you want to delegate properly you must delegate the responsibility for a business result - not a task.  To do this, you need a clear, agreed definition of success and this is almost always a number. If you want to develop employees you must develop their business understanding, commercial awareness and ability to plan.  All of these things require conversations and coaching based around numbers; what they should be, what they actually are and what needs to change to close the gap or improve. If you want employees to consistently succeed by achieving their number then what is delegated must be a repeatable, teachable, measurable process. Some business owners think applying numbers to managing employees will be ...

One major benefit of  The Scaleup Formula© is that it helps you  develop your management team. Your key employees may have had limited management training so they are coming from a long way back in terms of becoming capable and accountable managers. The effort is worthwhile. Not only are the people concerned loyal and passionate about the product but it avoids the huge risk of hiring senior people from outside the company. Managers from larger businesses in particular can be fish out of water when they move to a more senior position in a smaller business, with disappointment on both sides the result. The Scaleup Formula© provides a  simple and repeatable method to develop management skills that can be applied quickly to free up your time (usually, the biggest constraint on growth).  The Scaleup Formula©   uses business processes as “units of delegation”. Each process to be delegated has a clear start point or trigger and a single output or result. It can be...

Most of us as leaders and managers understand that business is about people.  With the right people, a clear and worthwhile aim and good leadership you can achieve anything. How then can business be reduced to formulas?  More to the point, why would you want to do such a thing? Well of course business is measured using formulas; profit margin, growth, return on investment, customer retention and so on.  Used with intelligence and insight as key performance indicators these measurements can drive action and improve life for business owners. But that's not the kind of formula I'm talking about.  I'm thinking about meta-formulas, "belief formulas" that capture a belief about business. Perhaps the most famous of these is the formula that links employee satisfaction to customer satisfaction to profitability explained by Heskett, Sasser and Schlesinger in "The Service Profit Chain".  There are data supporting this linkage but in essence it describes a way of m...