How to restructure a new fast-growing business with tangible products?

Marieta,

With a fast growing company, with uncontrollable organic growth, a good way to address the growth in a manner that is controllable, is to place the business on a functional basis allowing amongst other thigs scalability, allowing the business to grow in a controlled way, based on demand.

This would require some upfront investment in time, effort and analysis resulting in costed short, medium and long term plans for placing the business on a functional basis.

Steps

1. Invest in analysing the business structure and associated functions, identifying core business functions
2. Identify the current roles and responsibilities and how they match/align to business functions
3. Identify functional areas where if the business grows, those functions should operate discretely
4. Seek to put the business on a structured functional basis i.e. business function and associated resources required to deliver the function, costed per function by resource
5. Having defined this structure, the business owner can decide how much to invest in staff to deliver those functions (short, medium long term) and on this basis the owners will free up their time.
6. in addition the functions can now scale as the scalability is no longer dependant on the owners or a single point of failure.

Each function would be headed up by a lead/manager, responsible for delivering the business function.

This model allows the owners to operate strategically and the operational leads to deliver strategic requirements in terms of growth and operational management.

As a point of interest, I have carried out this type of work during the course of the last two years for a small accountancy company (8-10 people), with a large client list and very high turnover.

They had grown organically and been financially successful for the last 10-12 years, but were looking to expand and to be more ‘agile’ in responding to shifts in market trends. In their original guise they could not do this and had to switch to a more functional basis to allow scale and more agile flex to grow or shrink relatively quickly.

Achieving the shift from organic growth to functional basis took:

• 4 months analysis
• 6 months planning for the changes took (including technology, process changes and bottoming out recruitment and upskilling requirements) a
• Approximately 4 months executing the change itself