12. From Chaos to Control: Building the Capacity, People, and Systems to Scale Your Shop

Hello again, everyone.

Welcome back to the Manufacturing Blueprint podcast.

Today is part two of our two-part series on scaling a manufacturing business.

In part one, we covered how growth creates chaos, and we gave some tips on combating that chaos, and in part two, we're gonna be talking about how to grow without losing control.

Scaling a manufacturing business, it isn't just about adding machines or adding people, it's about building a system and a team that can handle growth before it shows up.

So we think about growth, that growth oftentimes it will expose weaknesses, weaknesses in our foundation, weaknesses in our processes, weaknesses in our system, and it's really important for us to, to start to combat that early on.

So oftentimes when that happens, the result is people not knowing what they should be doing.

There's maybe a lack of standard work, and then that leads to, like we talked about earlier, the chaos, not having visibility.

That's leading us to reactive decisions.

Overall today, we just wanna talk about the idea of building a platform before the growth starts to expose those gaps.

That's right.

Growth is the ultimate stress test for your business.

It increases revenue, but it also is gonna multiply the complexity, the volume of tasks, and forces every part of your organization to handle more weight than it was originally designed for.

The underlying foundations of your systems, your leadership and the culture, and the fragility of it will be tested as you continue to grow and expand as a business.

You know, it's funny, like, I think so often as leaders, we think about, you know, we're trying to plan out the next job, we're trying to, to plan out the future as best we can, but there's a lot of things really behind the scenes that needs to happen that doesn't get the attention, and that's really what causes a lot of that chaos, a lot of those issues when you do start to grow.

I would say 99% of the businesses out there, they wanna grow.

That's one of their goals.

But doing these things really behind the curtain is what's going to help them actually not only achieve that growth, but sustain that growth.

And in many cases, there's, there's not this blueprint, you know? It's not a situation where you can just like, "Oh, okay, well, I have to do X, Y, Z, and if I do those things, then we're perfect." Like, there's a lot of things that you just gotta figure out what works best for your company.

So there's gonna be some guidelines that we might talk through, but ultimately, there's gonna have to be decisions that have to be made for you as an individual company to make those things be successful as you go into that growth period.

Yeah.

So in the last show, Jason, we talked a, a lot about, like, reactive stuff, right? When you find yourself in the chaos of growth.

In this show, I guess we're hoping to talk about how we can be more front-footed, right, and prepare for that to get less caught out and, and to avoid falling into some of those traps earlier.

So I guess we're starting with how do we prepare for that, right?

Yeah, that's it.