In this podcast, we have a chat with Alicia Butler-Pierre, a chemical engineer who used to work for Monsanto and had experience in big companies like Shell and Coca-Cola before founding Equilibria to help small businesses prepare for the challenges of scaling.
We discuss how growth is only good when it is manageable and there are good optimisation processes in place to prepare for this, how to recognise bad optimisation processes and avoid them by making sure you don’t focus on marketing and promotion to the detriment of yours operational systems, and the necessity of paying attention to the small details and the feedback your customers are providing to figure out if you need to change things.
When documenting a process, many business owners put this off thinking it will be a boring and arbitrary list that will take up 20 pages and be skimmed over when read, but this doesn’t have to be the case. You can set up a screen recording doing a step-by-step of your important systems or just record yourself talking through the necessary processes clearly to make a 5-10 minute video which easily outlines your required metrics for new employees and can be easily redone or updated as you grow.
Main Topics
- Business Growth
- Scaling
- Optimising Processes
- Documenting Processes
- Challenges at Each Stage of Growth
Guest
- Alicia Butler-Pierre – chemical engineer, author, entrepreneur and founder of Equilibria
Main Questions
- Should everyone focus on growth in a business?
- How can you tell if the business is growing faster than you can handle?
- What are the most efficient ways to document processes?
- What are the hardest stages of growth?
- How do you maintain your optimisation processes as you scale?
An Interesting Point
- When trying to find funding to get off the ground or scale up, don’t get lost in the bigger picture and overlook small details thinking that it doesn’t matter in the long run as long as you can get your idea out there. Your product or service is important but not more than what your customers actually want and require from you and you overlook their feedback to your detriment.