What enables a company to scale? In a series of upcoming blogs, I’ll be looking at one particular book and the scaling tools and methodologies it offers. Scaling Up: Mastering the Rockefeller Habits 2.0 by Verne Harnish and contributors is an excellent guide to help business leaders scale effectively. Building on his earlier work, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, this book focuses on four key decision areas: People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash. It provides practical techniques and exercises for growing a business, with a focus on aligning team efforts and maintaining sustainable growth.
Verne Harnish has developed a business framework for scaling companies which many of you will have heard me reference before, the Gazelles Growth Methodology. It draws from strategic management and entrepreneurial principles, and is influenced by lean thinking, agile methodologies, and balanced scorecard concepts (with their focus on efficiency, adaptability, and performance management).
A business needs more than inspiration
There are countless business books offering advice or inspiration about any aspect of business you care to mention. But ideas alone are not enough to steer a business towards optimum growth and profitability. Scaling is not just about theory. You have to actually put in the work, and that means rolling up your sleeves and getting hands-on with the day-to-day mechanics of the business.
If you’ve read the bestseller The E-Myth (or its more recent follow-up, The E-Myth Revisited) by Michael Gerber, you’ll know that the fundamental practice that can change a business is the implementation of systems and processes. Gerber argues that successful businesses operate like franchises, where every aspect of the business is systematised and documented.
This approach ensures consistency, efficiency, and scalability – allowing the business to function independently of the owner. Nothing is left to chance, and everyone knows exactly what they should be doing. If you focus on creating a business that can run smoothly without you, the business becomes more sustainable and less reliant on any single person. That’s exactly what the tools in Scaling Up will help you do.
A practical, whole-system approach
Dipping into a page or chapter here or there and hoping for motivation won’t be enough. If you want to successfully scale, you will need to learn the core concepts in Scaling Up and then follow all the guidance and practical exercises in the book, implementing them in the business and monitoring the results.
It’s rare enough for us to see companies that walk the walk. Most small business owners get so busy in the business they have no time to work on the business or on themselves. Everything is firefighting. More than half businesses we see do not prepare budgets or have access to management accounts. They haven’t drafted policies for the company to follow, their employees do not have proper job descriptions, nor do they benefit from training or regular reviews. It’s no wonder these companies either fail or stay very small.
Typically, the only exception to this is in the case of serial entrepreneurs, where the founder has either scaled a company before or worked in a much bigger organisation. These people bring a different mindset, building the business in a far more structured and resourced way. They know how it should be done and have the confidence to invest the right resources to do it properly.
Even so, these business owners work incredibly hard to succeed and growth is in no way guaranteed. However, the chance of success for these founders is much higher. When they put in the work in a systematic and focused way, they are more likely to enjoy the big wins.
Implement and practise good habits
One of our clients put this into practice when going from a founder-only business to building out the team. They spent time drafting their organisation chart – highlighting the responsibilities and reporting lines. Having formerly been responsible for everything, the founder now had an operations manager, and it was important to designate who was responsible for what. This ensured that there were no situations where they both managed the same thing, or some things weren’t managed at all.
The following year, they did the exercise again. The operations manager had become a director in the meantime so everything they had established just 12 months before needed to be completely changed. The new organisation chart saw the new director taking over all the founder’s non-service delivery duties and the founder then concentrating solely on service delivery.
This is a common enough predicament that Gerber also explores in The E-Myth. His research showed that most businesses are started by people who were technically good at a certain task or skill, rather than by entrepreneurs. His hypothesis was that these technical people do not necessarily have the skills or experience to run a business or grow a business and as a result most of these businesses fail.
In the example of our client, if management had not actually put pen to paper and had the difficult conversations about dividing responsibilities and authority, they would never have come through the period of growth. Their commitment to implementing and practicing the good habits discussed in Scaling Up has been key to their success.
Scaling Up as a method book for success
Scaling-Up: Mastering the Rockefeller Habits 2.0 is not simply a book. I think of it as more akin to doing an MBA, as today there is an entire community of brilliant and experienced consultants teaching this material. If you have the budget, you can work alongside one of these experts. Even if you don’t, keep doing all the actions recommended in each chapter and come back to them again and again until the habits are ingrained in your business.
The clue is in the title after all; it’s not for nothing this book is called ‘mastering the habits’. In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell tells us it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert or master performer. So, if you want real and lasting results, don’t think of this book as a five-hour read but as your method book for your 10,000 hours of practice on the way to becoming a master of scaling up.
I hope you find the upcoming blog series useful. We will add each blog below as they are published so that you don’t miss anything.
