This one thing is the biggest enemy of scale in your business

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4:27

Within our greatest strength lies our greatest weakness

One of the privileges of my life has been building Casual to be a global organisation. Serving some of the world’s largest businesses at a global scale. Our staff are in the office, somewhere in the world for 136 of the 168 hours of the week. That doesn’t include the heroes who routinely give up their weekends to travel, shoot, or work over the weekends. And that happens quite a lot too.

To use a slightly loaded phrase, Casual is a business on which the sun almost never sets. That’s an amazing thing. It is what makes us unique in our market.

But…

That strength also breeds complexity. Running a global company means that there are nearly always Slack messages to respond to, late-night or early-morning calls to make, and a hundred daily tasks which don’t end when any individual’s working day ends. It also makes decision-making harder, as getting the right people ‘on the phone’ is sometimes just not possible.

It also means that being aligned as a leadership team becomes harder. Opportunities for us to all get in the room together are few and far between. It means that culture is not a ‘stick some vinyl slogans on the wall’ exercise, but an essential part of a company's successful functioning.

Now, the system obviously works, but it means that complexity is something we deal with on a daily basis. Our greatest strength is also our greatest weakness. (I appreciate that you could flip this the other way around - as the Stoics might - and argue that the obstacle is the way. But that's another blog post.)

The Science of Scaling

I was reading the excellent book, The Science of Scaling, the other day. It’s well worth a look for anyone serious about scaling any company rapidly. In it, Dr Benjamin Hardy, argues compellingly that complexity is the enemy of scale. The only way to scale anything is to break it down to it’s most valuable core parts, removing everything else, and then scale these.

So how do we go about doing this?

Clarity kills complexity

The most important lesson I have learned – beyond the essence of culture – is that everyone needs a single goal, number or KPI to work towards. This is driving us to reexamine everyone in the business’s responsibilities, to make sure they know exactly what they are aiming at.

Clarity kills complexity, so ensuring that each member of the business has a crystal-clear idea of what success looks like is key.

Technology

We use the latest technology – Smart Casual, AI, communications, CRMs, file management - to keep track of projects, project creativity and financials. Global cloud data management allows post-production from anywhere, while shared project files and information keep post simple.

Prove value

Tying creativity to ROI. A global enterprise cannot survive on a project that is a ‘nice to have’. Framing outcomes in terms that CFOs understand, by being clear about goals and then tracking effectiveness against them is an essential part of the mix. Reporting, benchmarking and clear case studies all feed into this.

Fight overhead like the coming of the night

Continually examining overhead is a painful, but essential part of the process too. The lighter a business is, the faster it can evolve and the more resilient to change it becomes. We have moved from most of our offices over the last year, because the nature of production has changed. Keeping studios and 12+ edit desks in each office doesn’t make sense in a world where editors work from home – or a different country – 95% of the time.

Fighting complexity is a continual battle, because by our nature humans create it. Creative humans – and I am a particular culprit – create it more than most. So, as an operator, you need to seek it out and expunge it, every single day.

I can’t really say it better than Steve Jobs: