Scaling the Business Mountain

Here’s a fun little exercise to try when you have a free moment.

Grab a piece of paper and imagine that overnight your business doubled…no…TRIPLED in size.

Now, as great as that would be, start imagining what your days would look like or how your work flow would change.

Start writing down what would break down if this scenario actually came to pass. Would it be your software? Your phone? Your car? Your body or sanity? How about all of the above? There will always be something that you depend on which will not be able to bear the strain of added business.

The purpose of this exercise is not to scare you, but to merely get you thinking – in most cases businesses never plan for being able to rapidly expand or contract efficiently, which will inevitably lead to the aforementioned breaks.

So how can you make sure that your business can effectively handle the work load when businesses is booming or curtail operations when things slow down? As I’m sure we can all surmise, the answer lies in effective planning, but in this case, specifically in the concept of scalability.

This concept, originally intended for software engineering, refers to the “desirable property of a system, a network, or a process, which indicates its ability to either handle growing amounts of work in a graceful manner, or to be readily enlarged” according to Andre Bondi.

In the world of business, this means that your processes and work flow are organized in such a way that we can scale operations up or down depending on the market, and falls into two separate categories – vertical scaling, and horizontal scaling.

Vertical scaling (aka scaling up or down) refers to the addition or subtraction of additional resources within a single node of a system (read: business component) in order to aid in its efficiency. An example might be upgrading your computers hardware to more efficiently handle your added workload, or trading your old cell phone in for an internet connected smart phone to help you be more efficient on the go.

Horizontal scaling (aka scaling out or in) on the other hand refers to adding or removing complete nodes to a system. A perfect example of this is adding more human capital – aka employees – to your business should it be deemed necessary, or consolidating from two offices to a single location should your business contact.

At Point2 this concept has become more and more important to us over the past year as we expand as a business. In the last 12 months we have added over 30 staff and added more hardware then we ever thought possible; all in order to help us meet the demand for our products. This would have never been possible if we had not made scalability a priority, and made it a major component of our business planning.

How scalable is your business?

all images credited to Julia Fullerton-Batten