Using Data to Build Operations That Scale

If your business doubled its customer base overnight – could your operations keep up?

If not, how long would it take before you could handle that level of increased demand without sacrificing quality?

If your answer to the first question is yes, feel free to stop reading. You probably won’t get much value out of this newsletter.

But for those who aren’t as confident in their company’s ability to rapidly scale operations, I might have a few tips for you.

What Are Scalable Operations?

First, let’s define what “scalable operations” even means. It’s the ability to handle increased demand without compromising efficiency, quality, or cost-effectiveness. Essentially, this is growth that’s sustainable, not chaotic.

The Two Main Levers of Scalability

So how do you achieve scalable operations? I’d propose focusing on two main levers:

1. Better predictability of inputs and outputs, or knowing exactly what inputs are needed to produce the desired outputs. If you don’t know exactly what resources you need and when you need them to serve 10 new customers that come in the door tomorrow, it’s likely growth will breed chaos.

2. Improving your input to output ratio, or doing more with less. If you forever need to hire one new sales rep to bring in an additional 10 customers each month, sales capacity will be a limiting factor for growth. Finding ways to make your sales reps more efficient unlocks a new level of growth – each unit of sales input produces more output.

How To Pull These Levers

Okay, so how exactly do we pull these levers?

For one, the better you understand your current and historical state, the better you can predict what inputs are needed to produce your desired outputs. And data is one of the best tools for getting radical visibility into your current state.

Point two requires designing systems, processes, and infrastructure that can expand smoothly as the business scales, rather than breaking under pressure or requiring constant manual fixes.

And again, data proves invaluable for evaluating and improving your systems and processes, ensuring they’re built for scale.

4 Ways We Use Data to Drive Scalability

Here are four practical ways we use data to help our clients improve operational efficiency:

1. Tracking the right KPIs to illuminate gaps and opportunities. One tech taking twice as long to complete the same service as another? Let’s dig in further to see if there are steps that can be standardized or improvements we can make to our onboarding and training processes.

2. Proactively flagging issues before they compromise service delivery. Construction project on track to go over budget? Let’s alert the right people early so they can intervene. Customer support agent taking too long to respond to customers? Let’s flag that in real-time rather than waiting for the customer to complain.

3. Automating or augmenting manual processes. Too many leads for sales reps to work each day? Let’s use data to identify and surface the highest quality leads for our sales reps to prioritize.

4. Ensuring process adherence. Redesigned your work authorization process such that your team must get approval from customers prior to starting any work? Let’s immediately flag cases when this doesn’t happen.

Final Thoughts

Using data to illuminate inefficiencies, automate processes, and ensure consistency allows your business to grow without breaking under pressure.

And the more efficiently you can convert inputs into outputs, the more scalable your business becomes.

If you’re ready to use data to transform your operations, grab a time on my calendar here.

Thanks for reading!
Josh

P.S. To learn more about JS Analytics and what we do, check out our website here.