Automation: A Bedrock for Scalable Business

Company growth should not mean chaos or loss of unity. As you onboard more staff, your company will need to work hard at maintaining its consistency and error-free reputation. What’s the best way to make sure the quality of customer service is keeping up with your growth?

Automation is helping businesses scale at an unprecedented rate. Just a few years ago it was hard to imagine a company like Snapchat reaching a $15bn valuation with a staff of little more than 300. For companies that are already mid-to-large sized, automation presents the opportunity to reach more customers faster, while reducing churn, internal inconsistencies and plain old human error.

The statistics on marketing automation speak volumes: according to one report, 63% of companies outgrowing the competition are using automation. Even more impressively, 79% of top performing companies overall have been doing so for over two years.

Automation Means Scalability

Why? It’s simple.

Scalability refers to your company’s ability to successfully grow without causing additional hurdles, issues or costs. One issue that often arises as new staff members join the team is inconsistency in communication with customers, often seen through inconsistencies in operational documents, which erodes customer trust. Whether it’s a contract, survey, or an invoice, your operational documents must be unified, making automation the bedrock of a scalable business.

Assuring that operational documents are consistent not only helps to maintain professionalism, but it also permits high-level management to focus on big-picture, rather than operational, issues. According to Forbes, this is the type of tactic that allows you to “focus on the key activities which move your business forward in a strategic way” without which “you’re doomed to stagnate. Forever.”

By having software take on the heavy lifting, both you and your staff are able to focus on what you do best – signing bigger and better deals, building new products, and expanding existing ones.

No Scalability Without Stability

Automation is the key to maintaining consistency and trust in your company as it grows. This is a model that today is being adopted, but can be traced back further than you might think. An Inc article on this topic explores how the founder of McDonalds, Ray Kroc, knew that ensuring consistency was the key to trust and therefore insisted that the backbone of the company be ‘automated’ from the start:

“Ultimately, the goal was to encourage and even ensure repeat business based on his system’s reputation, rather than the quality of a single store or person. It was this simple yet infinitely scalable model that allowed the chain to grow into the global behemoth it is today.”

This strategy of building customer loyalty based on consistent branding and product, not only helped make the chain an incredible success, it put the company in a position to be increase its scalability.

So what’s the take-away?

If your company is growing and you want to keep up, you must ensure consistency and unity—and the key to reach those benchmarks, is automation.