The Cost of Scaling: Improving Before Expanding

When you engage an external marketing firm or contractor, you're essentially investing in amplifying your current operational state—warts and all. This critical aspect of business scaling is often overlooked. The adage that it costs a dollar to fix a problem before construction, ten dollars during, and a hundred dollars post-construction rings especially true here.

Bringing in consultants and contractors to scale operations magnifies existing inefficiencies rather than mitigates them. For instance, in a project aimed at enhancing a tech team's agile development practices, the push to rapidly expand by opening a new office in a different country exposed the pitfalls of scaling prematurely. The attempt to transplant underdeveloped processes across diverse geographical, temporal, and cultural landscapes only compounded the challenges.

The lesson here is clear: the cost of change escalates with the size of your team, particularly when it involves seasoned members accustomed to established routines. Before reaching out for external assistance to scale, consider refining and solidifying your current processes with your core team first. This foundational strength is what truly enables sustainable growth.

Steve Berry
Principal, Thought Merchants