Why you’re getting this: I’m Ayman Al-Abdullah and this is my CEO Newsletter. You probably signed up via one of my social links:

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Thanks for taking the time to read my newsletter.
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Let me ask you a question:

What is the first step to building a 50 story skyscraper?

Answer: Build a 50 story foundation.

A company ready to scale up has the foundation built, and is ready to quickly build itself up to a 50 story building without crumbling.

In my last email, we discussed the “9 Steps to 9 Figures” framework:

You can see that the first step of the Scale Up phase is Process.

Building processes is all about making your business repeatable. How do you add new customers, how do you deliver your product or service for those customers, and how do you retain your customers?
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If your critical business processes aren’t automated (or at least documented for employees to follow), then your business won’t be able to grow.

I’ve talked about how a different leadership style is required at each stage in your business’ growth. In the beginning, the founder needs to be the Chief Product Officer to create a product that solves customers’ problems.

As you bring on new customers, you’ll need to be the Chief Marketing and Sales Officer to build your Promotion engine.

During the Process step, you’ll need to graduate to Chief Operations Officer.
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A marketing-driven leader hustles to get their customers.

A COO builds the playbook to hand off to an expert to run, improve, and refine. Or even better, automates the whole thing.

The objective of this step is identifying the bottlenecks in your company’s growth and creating processes that fix those bottlenecks.

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There are three main processes you need to create before you can master the Scale Up phase:

1. Your Profit Factory: How do you actually make money? How do you turn your hustle into dollars in the bank? You need processes for the entire profit-making cycle of your business, from customer acquisition to fulfillment to billing.
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2. Recruiting: How do you attract and hire top talent? Is this a science or are you just winging it?
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3. Your Leadership Process: This starts with how you lead yourself. How are you deciding what to work on each day? Are you working on the highest leverage (low input vs high output) strategic tasks or just responding to the latest slack message?
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While you may have found your first several clients in a variety of ways (tapping personal connections, sending cold emails, and attending events), it’s time to hone in on your core process for adding new customers.
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Documenting your process and quickly training new hires on it will be key for keeping the customer acquisition flywheel spinning.

Hiring and recruiting talent is definitely a process; too many companies wait until they have hundreds of employees before implementing a true hiring process.

But hiring determines your company’s culture. If you have no real process for hiring, your company’s culture will get diluted.

This sounds simple enough, but think about how many different people make hiring decisions at a growing company. How do we ensure that your CMO is hiring marketing people that will fit the culture just as well as those being hired by the CFO?

Outlining clear processes for your team helps to fix this.

Your company’s processes also help your team prioritize what to focus on. Instead of each person in the company independently deciding how to handle a situation, they can look to a relevant process to help determine what the priority should be.

After all, you can’t expect to do everything as your business scales up. You’ll need to put most parts of the business into the capable hands of your employees, but they’ll need a blueprint to follow.

In other words, you know how to run your business. But if you bring in more employees to help run it, they won’t know how unless you create a process.

Talk soon,