Which part of your business gets harder every time you win a customer?

Not all work grows at the same rate.

Making one more unit is usually a straight line. Twice the orders, twice the material, twice the time. That kind of growth is manageable because you can see it coming.

Some work grows faster than the business does, and that is where the trouble is. Coordination is the obvious one. Four people need six conversations to stay aligned. Eight people need twenty eight.

The ones that bite in a small business

Following up. Ten open enquiries can be held in a head. Forty cannot, and the failure is not gradual. It works, it works, it works, and then one week it does not.

Knowing where things are. With fifteen live orders, somebody knows all of them. With sixty, nobody does, and the business starts answering customers with let me check.

Collection. Twenty outstanding bills can be chased from memory. A hundred cannot, and the money that slips is not spread evenly. It is concentrated in the quiet customers nobody got to.

Checking quality of work. One person can look over everything at low volume. At higher volume that person becomes the bottleneck, and the usual response is to stop checking.

What to do with this

Go through your main processes and mark each one straight line or worse than straight line.

The second list is short, usually three or four items, and it is exactly the list of things to fix before you grow rather than after. Fixing them after means doing it during the months when you have least time.

Which of your processes is already harder than it was a year ago, even though the business only grew a little?

Spotting which processes will not survive the next doubling, and fixing those first, is the work we do before growth rather than after. Tell us where it already feels tight.