Automate Your Agency

The Scalability Test: Could you double your team tomorrow?

• Alane Boyd & Micah Johnson • Season 1 • Episode 40

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Trying to scale without standardizing your processes is like building a skyscraper on quicksand, it’s only a matter of time before things start sinking.

Here’s a question: If you doubled your team tomorrow, would everything still run smoothly? Or would it be a total disaster? That’s The Scalability Test, and if your answer makes you sweat, this episode is a must listen.

Alane Boyd and Micah Johnson break down why standardization is the real key to sustainable scaling. They’re getting real about the processes, templates, and systems that keep businesses running smoothly, and how to implement them without getting stuck in the weeds.

Here’s what you’ll get:

 💡 The biggest mistakes businesses make when trying to scale (and how to avoid them).

 💡 Why creating a “company way” isn’t about control, it’s about efficiency.

 💡 How standardization can actually increase creativity and innovation.

🚀 Want to dive deeper? Take our free Process Mapping Crash Course and start standardizing your workflows today.

Liked this episode? Share it with a friend who is ready to scale, and let’s build businesses that actually run smoothly, together!

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0:00:00 - (Alane): Welcome to Automate Your Agency. Every week we bring you expert insights, practical tips, and success stories that will help you streamline your business operations and boost your growth. Let's get started on your journey to more efficient and scalable operations. Micah, you and I were having just a, like, casual chat yesterday and made me really realize, like, we took a lot of what we've done for granted when it comes to systemization and how much that plays into the foundation for scaling.

0:00:33 - (Micah): Yeah, yeah. I mean, maybe it would help. Like, what do we mean by we took it for granted? Because I think that's a piece that we even had to figure out ourselves.

0:00:42 - (Alane): Yeah, well. And things that even between you and I, I just did not see initially. Like you would say, a lot of what we're doing early on in this business is like I'm working with the, the CEO or the founder of the owner of the company, and it really is on how do you systemize and standardize. And I'm looking at it like that, like, that's no value. Basically, like, we're not providing value to the client because that is very obvious.

0:01:08 - (Alane): Of course you have to have these things or you wouldn't be able to scale.

0:01:13 - (Micah): Right. And then like.

0:01:15 - (Alane): And now.

0:01:16 - (Micah): So that's what we kind of took for granted. Yeah, yeah.

0:01:19 - (Alane): So taking it for granted and then just being more involved with clients and just seeing, you know, even just with the idea of automation, they, you know, I want to automate things. Well, okay, well, what's the system you have in place? Do you have standardization? Do you have SOPs? Because if you don't, then every single way that somebody does something is different. You can't automate 45 different ways of doing something or you need 45 different automations.

0:01:47 - (Alane): So then, okay, so then I'm realizing these words coming out of my mouth and you're going, yeah, I agree with you. Yeah, like, you know, clients do need systems and standardization so that they can systemize their business, they can scale, or even some just don't want to work 80 hours a week anymore. You know, these things, the standardization helps to remove you from the process. If you want or scale your team past just you and a few people.

0:02:16 - (Micah): Yeah, I. I mean, so you just, you just touched on something super, super valuable, which is if everybody's doing it a different way, then when you go to streamline or optimize or automate or leverage AI, then you have every different way that you could do it times, you know, however many things you want to automate, and it gets to be a mess. So, you know, one of the things that you and I talked about a little bit yesterday was, and you brought it up was the standardization.

0:02:46 - (Micah): And I think, you know, if people hear that, maybe just like us, we kind of glossed over that or we took it for granted, like, oh, yeah, standardization. I need to do that, too. Cool. But not how important and how big that is. So if we kind of go back to your example, like, if you have a team of 45 and everybody's doing it their own way, which we see all the time. It's very common.

0:03:13 - (Alane): Like.

0:03:13 - (Micah): Right.

0:03:14 - (Alane): Every time.

0:03:15 - (Micah): Yeah. And. And indicators are. That is, the process works, the workflow works, but it's in everybody's head. When it's in everybody's head, it's going to happen differently every single time. And then so to take a step back and say, well, how do we standardize that? What we're essentially saying is we're going to do it one way, the company way, period. Yeah.

0:03:38 - (Alane): The company's way, not Micah's way. It is going to be a consistent way that the company does it. So that we don't have 45 different ways. We have one way.

0:03:49 - (Micah): Yep.

0:03:51 - (Alane): And that's the difficult. That's the crux of it. Right. And why companies one is time. The time to consolidate all those different ways into one way is time. Right. And a lot of times people look at it and they're like, well, we don't want to do all these things. We just want the problem solved. Well, you're not going to solve that problem with automation. I'm sorry. That's going to make your automation even more complicated. Because now you need that many different scenarios for that. Doesn't scale your team. What scales your team is this systemization, having standardization and Micah. Just thinking through, like, what are some ways. And I can talk through some, too, but what are some ways that you see companies needing to standardize?

0:04:37 - (Alane): Like, there's some simple ways and then there's some more complex ways.

0:04:40 - (Micah): Yeah. I mean, it comes down to anything. So, you know, we've. We've talked about workflows, we've talked about processes, We've talked about systems in the past on this podcast, Alane and I came up with an analogy the other day that I think might be helpful for this discussion. Which is essentially, a workflow is like a letter in a word, and you need a bunch of letters to form the word, but you have to put those letters in the right order, or it's not really a word or it's a word you don't intend to be saying or creating.

0:05:14 - (Micah): And so you have your workflows, those are your letters, you put them in the right order and your word is your process. Mm. So then you string together a bunch of processes which makes a sentence, which is helping you achieve some sort of communication. Same thing in operations. So you have to have your workflows, which are your letters, those go in the right order. Then you have your processes, which are your words, those also have to go in the right order.

0:05:42 - (Micah): And what I. Basically, you can imagine in your head, like if you have everybody spelling words differently and putting words in different order differently, you're creating sentences. Right. You're creating some sort of output, but it's not going to be very understandable, it's not going to be consistent. The person on the other end that you're trying to communicate with is going, what the hell are you talking about? Like, this doesn't make any sense.

0:06:09 - (Micah): And so standardization as a whole is really just saying, like, what are the letters of my word? What order and then what words to the sentence and getting everybody to do it the same way over and over and over again. That's where automation becomes really powerful. Because once you standardize how something runs a system, then everything else flows through and you're making the same sentence every.

0:06:37 - (Alane): Single time over and over again. Yeah, I like. I think about some really easy ones is that I actually, I see this extremely underutilized at every single company is shared email templates. You don't need to recreate the wheel every single time. A shared template for commonly asked questions, onboarding new clients, welcome emails, introduction emails like, and I'm. I'm very. This is one of the things that I take on myself at our company because I am an ultra user of shared email templates, because I want us to have a company way of saying things and I don't want our team or myself to have to spend extra time thinking of every word. When this is something that could be standardized, we do it the same way. It's very consistent.

0:07:29 - (Alane): And then that's something external. Right. The client sees that. But an internal example is how we manage client projects. We have a very systemized approach to how we manage them, from even an account manager to a project manager, and how our development team handles the production work for an automated workflow. That way our team gets what we call a complete request. It's got everything that they need. We've got different statuses so that when something moves to validation, well, the account manager needs to make sure what was produced, what the client wants all makes sense, and that everything is working properly so that when we go into that client meeting, we know it was built, we understood what was built, and that it's working appropriately.

0:08:14 - (Alane): So, like, that's two different ways where standardization, if you don't have that and you have a client go into your workflow, every client's going to be treated different and every person touching that client is going to be handling it different.

0:08:27 - (Micah): Yeah, I mean, there's so many examples of this from client onboarding, employee onboarding, like you said, project management, even down to how do we create proposals for getting new clients on board. If you don't standardize it, then you're going to come up with a whole bunch of different proposals every single time somebody's going to do a different version, a different price sheet, a different order, a different layout, a different bio, whatever it might be in that proposal, it's going to be different or employee onboarding. We've talked about this and previous episodes as well. If you don't standardize how you do employee onboarding, well, employee A might have a great experience. Employee B shows up and is like, what do I do?

0:09:09 - (Micah): Nobody's even talking to me today.

0:09:12 - (Alane): Yeah. So let's use past Alane, me in the past, as, you know, an example of this where I am not seeing that this is so important that. That we just do naturally. Like, I think our clients trained us because we were in our previous company, because we were getting large clients that already had this in place and we followed in suit. When you're working with large automobile manufacturers, you have to have a standardized way of doing things. And then you're working with large auto groups with their corporate office. Like, you have to have this very systemized approach thing. So, you know, they trained us, and luckily we went with it and used that in our internal systems.

0:09:57 - (Alane): But what I think that clients don't realize and what I didn't value early on as past Alane, is the amount of time that this piece takes for you to get your ducks in a row before you can build a company system. Because when you've got to consolidate all the different ways people are doing things, all the different way, like your clients are used to you operating a certain way. If your client's been with you for five years, you've been gravitating to how they want you to work.

0:10:29 - (Alane): Not having a company system, it's okay if you change your systems, you know, to. And evolve things as you learn more and work with clients. But the Time that it takes, you know, people want this automation or their systems to just be working where it takes time for us to help you build that system. But also the team has to have the time in their schedule to plan how they want this to be or.

0:10:58 - (Micah): Even communicate what they're doing. Now, even that takes time. And there's, you know, there's brain power a lot of this. The systemization and the standardization is a gear shift from your everyday work. Which is why I bank it gets pushed to the side because you've got to handle clients, you've got to work on projects, you've got to get your tasks done, you've got to, you know, improve marketing or run new ads or whatever it might be. Right?

0:11:25 - (Alane): Yeah. You have all these to do tasks, like these things that you, you know, you're doing all day and to change gears, like you're saying is a strategic plan. You're not doing. You're not checking things off your to do list when you're. But trying to build out what your system is or what you want it to be.

0:11:43 - (Micah): So what's, what's your secret, Alane? Like, how do you make time for this?

0:11:47 - (Alane): I mean, it sounds awful when I say it out loud, but I make time for it because I don't want to do all the nitty gritty details. I like sitting on top of things and having the team delegate. So, you know, at the end of my day yesterday, it was. It was the. Probably the last 45 minutes of my work day yesterday. I created Looms Loom videos and very like detailed like, this is what I want. And I delegated it to the team.

0:12:18 - (Alane): And it was because I didn't want to be the one that continues doing it. And we needed three things that were very similar. And I only had to create the to do one time. And it's going to be executed the same way for each one of those three things. And I had a number. Like, I think I left at the end of the day with, you know, seven or eight things delegated. That's going to take a team member most of the day to day to do that I don't have to do.

0:12:44 - (Alane): So that's my secret is that I don't want to work. No, I want to work on. I like to work on strategy and ideas and. But I also like things to be executed and done. So I have to make sure I have the team members to do that. Because if I have to straddle both, then you're not getting the best, Alane. You're not Getting the best business partner out there.

0:13:05 - (Micah): Right, Right. And it's not solving anything by you taking a step back at the end of the day and saying, how can I delegate this? How can I map this out? How can I standardize what I need? You're not doing a full day of work of busy work. It's busy work. It is. It's busy work for leadership. Right. If you're running a company, you shouldn't be also doing all the work. You just can't. If you're managing people, you can't also do their jobs. Like just doesn't work. You have to set aside time.

0:13:39 - (Micah): So then we have time to record this podcast. Now, what's interesting is we talked about standardization on project management. This opens up a whole other can of worms with training, which we're not going to get into on this episode. But, you know, we're hiring people, we're scaling our team. You delegated some of this, and there was, like, the new person that is working on our team made a little bit of a rookie mistake. Right. They're in ClickUp. They got delegated a task. They did the task. They marked the task complete.

0:14:09 - (Micah): That's it. But that's not how we work here. So we actually go in and say, when you're done with the task, you move it to validation. You record a loom of what you did. So that now say, in your case, Alane, you can go back and review this task.

0:14:25 - (Alane): Mm. I think that validation step when you're building systems is super important. And not that everybody needs to check everybody's work, but at some point, you know, whether it's a manager or something, just keeping in and having some quality control, I think is. Is a great step to have. And then that way you can delegate some things that you want to still have your hands on at some point, but you don't want to do every little thing.

0:14:52 - (Alane): So that could be your way to still be a part of it, but, you know, have the system working for you.

0:14:59 - (Micah): And honestly, it's kind of a best practice because whether it's a va, an assistant, somebody else on your team that you're delegating to, or an AI, you probably want some sort of. Maybe I should look at this before it goes out.

0:15:13 - (Alane): So I. This reminded me of a conversation I had a couple of weeks ago, and it was just a real casual conversation with just a friend of mine. And. And he was kind of just talking through how he's realizing that he needs some standardization. Every client that they're managing, they're managing very holistically and it really falls on one main person because she's got all the institutional knowledge, which this institutional knowledge is a huge deal for a company because if they leave, they just left with how to handle things all like they, things might be working great because you have that person when they leave. That's when things suck.

0:15:58 - (Alane): So what I said to, to him was, if you had to h. If you had to double your team next week, how would that make you feel? And he's like, I would be in complete panic mode because we can't handle it. We don't, we don't have training in place. Everything is handled by somebody in their head. They already know how to handle that situation. So for us to double our team would be awful. They would just sit there most of the time.

0:16:27 - (Alane): That's also another symptom. If you just think through, if I had to double my team, how would do I have training in place? Do I have systems for them to be integrated into? Do I have workflows that they can be a part of only in their, what their knowledge. Like their piece of knowledge would be. For instance, a video editor might not need to be a part of the entire marketing process. They just need to be a part of that process.

0:16:52 - (Alane): Well, are you able to plug and play people when you need them? So like, these are some of the things if you're realizing, you know, do I have this, like, I feel like I've got systems in place. I think I've got some standardization. I feel like I could scale then say, could I legitimately double my team and everything would still be on cruise control?

0:17:10 - (Micah): I think that's a perfect question. I mean, that's, that's. Maybe the leave behind of this episode is just to ask yourself that question. Like you're saying, Alane. And even when you solve it at one point in your business, if your business grows, ask it again. Because you're adding new workflows, you're adding new systems, you're adding new processes, you're adding new technology, you're adding new automation.

0:17:35 - (Micah): That stuff, yes, it helps remove some of the stuff, but you need the other side of it, which is people need to know how it works. People need to know what's going on. And once it's centered around one person or two people, that's entering the danger zone.

0:17:52 - (Alane): Yeah, scaling is hard. And when people leave is hard. You're. You're stuck. So to wrap this up, a couple of things that can help is we have a free process mapping course. So process map your your workflow, start getting feedback on it, get the people that are involved in the process, run it through with them, see what you're missing, see how you can improve it, and then come together with a final plan of how it's going to work.

0:18:20 - (Alane): And then if any of this resonates with you and you want help, Micah and I are available to do coaching to help systemize your business. We love this is literally what we love doing and why we started this business. Thanks for listening to this episode of Automate Your Agency. We hope you're inspired to take your business to the next level. We have free content and tools for automating your business at our website workdayninja.com

0:18:44 - (Alane): and join us next week as.

0:18:45 - (Micah): We dive into more ways to automate and scale your business.

0:18:48 - (Alane): Bye for now.

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Alane Boyd

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Micah Johnson

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