Is Your Operating Model a Roadblock? How to Evaluate and Upgrade for Growth

The systems that helped you grow to this point might be holding you back. It's time to build a better blueprint for scale.

Scaling a growing business requires more than just adding new team members; it requires a clear, intentional design for how your company operates. The ad-hoc, informal systems that worked in the early days can quickly become barriers to growth. Evaluating your operating model is the process of getting a clear picture of what's working and what's holding you back, and then designing a more effective system for the future.

Why Your Operating Model Needs an Upgrade

Think of your business like a car. In the early stages, you might have a go-kart. It's simple, fast, and gets you from A to B. But as your business gets bigger and more complex, you need to build a vehicle that can handle longer distances, more passengers, and a higher speed. This new vehicle requires a different engine, a new transmission, and a more sophisticated design. Your new operating model!

Key Factors to Evaluate

When you assess your current operating model, you're not just looking at a few isolated problems. You’re looking at how your entire system works (or doesn't). Here are the three key areas to evaluate:

1. Organizational Design: This is all about how you structure your teams and how authority flows through your company. Are your teams organized by function (e.g., Sales, Marketing, HR), by product, or by something else? As you grow, you might find that the old structure is creating silos and slowing down decision-making. You'll need to consider whether a more centralized, decentralized, or hybrid structure will best support your goals.

2. Agility and Decision-Making: How quickly and effectively can your business adapt to change? When you were small, decisions were probably made by a few people in a room. Now, with more people and more complex challenges, that process might be bogged down in bureaucracy. You need to evaluate where decisions are made and how they are communicated. Are you still operating like a top-down hierarchy, or have you enabled more autonomy and speed across the organization?

3. Process and Capabilities: This is the "how" of your daily operations. You need to evaluate the systems that get the work done. Are your processes clearly defined and understood by everyone? Do you have the right talent and skills on your team to execute on your strategy? For example, your current marketing process may be a leader’s email to a team member, but for a larger organization, it's a project management system and a series of approval steps.

Architecting Your New Operating Model

Once you've evaluated your current model, it's time to design your future state. This isn't about copying another company; it's about building a model that aligns with your unique business goals and culture. The right operating model for your business depends on what you want to achieve—is your focus on consistency and control, or on speed and adaptability?

By taking the time to honestly evaluate your current operating model, you're not just fixing a problem; you're building the foundation for a scalable, efficient, and successful business.

Bottomline

An effective operating model is not a static blueprint, but a dynamic system that evolves with your business. By thoughtfully evaluating your current model, you can identify the roadblocks hindering growth and design a new system that propels you forward. At Nexus North, we partner with founders to navigate this critical transition, helping you build a scalable and resilient foundation. We work with you to analyze your organizational design, enhance agility, and optimize processes, ensuring your operating model is a strategic asset that supports your vision for sustained success.

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