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How easy is it for your organisation to scale its activities up (or down)?

As you add new customers, what will be the impact on you? Does each new customer come with a massive overhead, or can you add them in with little additional effort?

You need to ask yourselves these questions whatever service you provide - whether it's learning & development delivery, software, support etc.

It's very easy to say, "We're small", and not build the scaleability in at the beginning. But if you think that, then you'll either stay small, or you will find it very difficult to grow without significant, difficult changes.

Let's look at some of the things larger organisations do that help them cope with the size of their operation:

1. Depersonalised workforce - You'll rarely see an individual's email address when you deal with large organisations. Instead you get generic addresses and phone numbers that then allow the organisation to flex their numbers up and down as required.
2. Personalised customer service - to allow organisations to provide a personalised service, from a depersonalised workforce, you need to keep your customer information in one place, so that any customer-facing employee can get to it as needed.
3. Modularise - whether it's software or organisational functions, the more tightly defined each part is, the more flexible it becomes.
4. Connected - Modularisation brings disconnection, so large organisations try to ensure that information can still flow effectively. That may be through physical or virtual networking, or (with software) through well-defined APIs
5. One source, many instances - standardise the way you work and then deploy that multiple times. If you're talking software, then have a single codebase to maintain, that is used by all your customers.
6. Rapid iteration - Standardisation can cause stagnation, but your customers' needs are changing all the time. Build in processes which allow you to make changes quickly to the customer experience.
7. Strong foundations - The underlying processes and systems that allow your organisation to work, once they're in place, will be very hard to change (eg. finance systems, server architectures, software language). That change becomes harder the more people that use them. When you're building, make sure your foundations are strong enough, not just for the first floor, but also to add an extension... Otherwise, as you grow, you will end up spending a lot money just to maintain the foundation elements.

Of course, there are compromises. Small organisations can't afford enterprise systems. At least that's the accepted wisdom. But much of the approach to scale is less about buying the big systems, it's about a mentality that is always thinking: "How will this work when we grow"?

Here are some things even the smallest organisation can do, often for very little outlay:

1. Have a single phone number for customer enquiries. There are many companies offering virtual phone numbers that then allow you to redirect as required. Look for those that then allow you to add "extensions" easily.
2. Avoid using spreadsheets to maintain any sorts of records about your customers. Find a CRM system that you can grow into.
3. Keep modularity and mass customisation in mind whenever you are thinking about new products or services.
4. Build sharing and communication in at the heart of what you do. Small organisations are best focussing on their external communications, using established consumer tools. As you grow, you may want to keep some communications in-house, but with the culture there, it's much easier to change or add-in a new tool.
5. Make "Re-use" your mantra - whether you're talking about content, products, services, or waste. And avoid the sort of reuse where each customer gets a slightly different service that you then have to maintain separately. One product/service that can be used in multiple ways is the ideal.
6. Keep talking to your customers about what they need, and regularly review what you're doing. Stopping should always be an option on the table.
7. Build your organisation on systems and processes that have been proven in larger-scale situations, or make sure you can change horses easily when you need to.

Image credit: http://www.morguefile.com/archive/display/622153