Don’t Let Growth Outrun Your Internal Processes
Consistent SOPs and workflows are critical for restoration businesses looking to scale without sacrificing their margins
Need to Know
- Restoration companies need to have consistent, repeatable workflows in place in order to build sustainable growth.
- In order to do this, restorers need to be intentional about how they implement standard operating procedures from the start.
- Changes are going to happen, but they need to be evaluated and implemented consistently. Someone needs to own this evaluation process, too.
Most restoration companies don't think about the process until it breaks. The best way to tackle this is thinking about it from the start, and how you can eventually scale.
Picture a company doing $500,000 a year with one crew. That crew runs a straight line of the same work every day. That consistency is the process, whether it’s written down or not. The owner needs to find that workflow, name it, and treat it as an asset. Because when you grow to a million and add a second crew, the only question that matters is whether the second crew is doing what the first crew is doing. At $2 million, all crews need to follow the same processes, all the time.
So, build your process with that test in mind: can a crew that has never met you run the work the same way? A process that lives in one person's head doesn't pass that test.
The reason this matters is margin. If you're doing $2 million a year at 35% profit, it does you no good to reach $10 million at 20%. The discipline is simple in theory and hard to do:
- Find your process.
- Keep your process.
- Don't let it drift as you grow.
- Always put people in place to make it happen.
The failure pattern is predictable. Restorers get busy, they grow, and they stop thinking about their SOPs. They get left with people who have a different vision because the original was never passed down to anyone, and now you have chaos. That's what comes back to hurt your business.
None of this means a process is broken. Things are going to change, and technology is going to help your SOPs change. The golden rule is looking at what's changing and why. If it changes your SOPs for the better, let it happen. If it's a hindrance, it will only slow you down and push things out. That evaluation needs an owner. Some companies effectively run an SOP for SOP management, and there's nothing wrong with that.
The book ‘Traction’ by Gino Wickman covers the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) approach to running a business and makes the same point about scaling from $2 million to $20 million. Find your workflow, follow your workflow, and don't let the business move away from it.
Build the process before you need it to scale. It's much easier than rebuilding it after the chaos hits you head-on.
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