SCALE Operating System™ (SOS)
Despite over 600,000 new start-ups in the UK last year*, half will fail within their first five years**. Working with hundreds of business owners we boil it down to:
- Entrepreneurs feel overwhelmed and adrift in a business fog at some point; not knowing who to turn to or which way to go next.
- You’ll feel anxious and have many sleepless nights worrying about your business.
- All too often, you’ll be running around like a headless chicken in a panic, reacting to ‘surprises’.
- You and the team around you will be really frustrated time and time again as you repeat the same mistakes. It’s at this stage where self-doubt creeps in and you lose confidence in yourself and your business. Your second fear as a business owner (after going bankrupt) will be to look like a big fat failure.
- Eventually, you get bored, dis-engaged, fall out of love with your business and become stuck in a rut.
In business we’re always faced with new challenges, and we simply don’t know what the future holds. We know how we feel the way we do, but not necessarily always why.
Advocate’s SCALE Operating System™ (SOS) tells you WHY you feel the way you do:
- Without a clear Set-up of Strategy, you won’t know where you’re going, you’ll feel lost, you’ll be creating a culture of confusion. We refer to this as the Fog.
- If you’re not congruent; you don’t have the right people in the right seats, no clear systems or processes in place, no alignment, you’ll be worried and anxious. We know when clients are at this stage as they admit to sleepless nights.
- In our experience, you’ll have alarms and alerts going off in your business, but you don’t know why or what’s causing them, often when it’s too late. You’ll be in a panic, running around out of control. We call this stage headless chickens.
- Even if you have the above in place, are you learning any lessons? If you’re not learning from your mistakes time and time again you’ll be getting frustrated, you’ll be losing confidence in yourself and your business, and you’ll inevitably feel a failure.
- And finally, without an Execution Plan to ultimately Exit you won’t even progress, you’ll start getting bored and disengaged from your business, and on track to completely fall out of love with it. This we refer to as stuck in a rut.
The SCALE Model®
The SCALE Operating System™ (SOS) is based on the SCALE Model®, designed by Scalability Coach Martin Norbury. The SCALE Model was originally developed for business owners who are very serious and committed to growth. It is made up of five key elements that a company needs to successfully position their business to rapidly grow without relying on the owner.
S is for Set up of Strategy:
You need to start with the end score in mind so that you can measure the results. Getting absolute clarity and why is so important. Your vision, your values, your brand promise.
C is for Congruence:
Ensuring that everything and everyone who needs to be involved understands their role (and the goal), and there are systems and processes in place that support the business so it can run without you.
A is for Alerts & Alarms:
The importance of measuring the activity that creates the result and highlighting when it is not met. The “business” needs to tell us if it is not working; it’s too late to change things at the end.
L is for Lessons Learned:
A growing business is an evolving business – if you want to scale-up and exit then you need to be dedicated to continuous improvement.
E is for Execution to Exit, Experiment, Expand:
Is all about focussing on the execution strategies to expand or exit; releasing your involvement and giving you the freedom to do anything you want.
The Origins – The SCALE Philosophy
You may be wondering where the Scale Operating System originated from. Well, it’s so much more than a product, or set of tools; you see it’s a philosophy. And this philosophy was discovered by The Scalability Coach, Martin Norbury, who had been unconsciously applying scaling all his life (in fact from the age of 7). So to set the scene and show you what the power of scale, if applied correctly can achieve not only in business, but in everything you do, here’s an excerpt from Martin’s #1 Amazon Bestselling book I don’t work Fridays: https://myadvocatementor.com/discovery-of-scale-on-dancefloor/
* Centre for Entrepreneurs, Maximilan Yoshioka, 11 Jan 2016
** The Telegraph, Elizabeth Anderson, 21 Oct 2014
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Ad astra. From our Stars.
“Martin has a clarity which has allowed me to cut through the crap and focus on the big issues facing the exponential growth in my business. I nicknamed him The Scalability Coach because that’s what he does – helps my business grow. And we are talking from sub £1m to on its way to 8 figures turnover so that’s some growth!”
- Kate Lester, Founder & CEO of Diamond Logistics and Entrepreneur of the Year 2012