Scaling Up

When a service provider has a problem of too much business, the usual answer is to raise prices. They want you, and you only have so much time. At some point, you respond by just asking for more money. After all, time is the commodity that you sell, and when supply is limited, fee hike makes a total sense.

There are couple of problems with this approach. For one, while you are the hot commodity, you are pressured to maximize the amount of billable time - you want to seize every opportunity. While you do that, you are not able to innovate and stay on top of new technologies. So you slowly start to loose your edge. At the same time, you got accustomed to charging more and more that clients start to look for alternatives. And certainly, someone somewhere is noticing your success and wants piece of the pie as well.

We faced the similar dilemma while scaling up Marakana, but have chosen to respond differently. Instead of increasing prices, we chose to increase our capacity to deliver the service. The challenge with that is that you need people and processes to maintain quality.

To maintain quality, first you need to be able to measure it. For that, we implemented our Quality of Service methodology to measure vital factors of our delivery.

Regarding people, we chose to rely less on contractors and build our own expert team as part of the core staff. Contractors are often inconsistent. They tend to scale up by raising prices while often lowering quality. With our core team of experts on staff, we can work together to support each other. Also, we can make sure that we still invest a big chunk of our time on staying current, developing new content, supporting the community, speaking at conferences, and in general maintaining our edge.

Regarding processes, we have long ago invested in our Marakana Spark web platform (aka TrainingRocket.com). It is a highly scalable solution helping us limit amount of paper pushing (and thus human error) while maintaining high-value touch with the clients and consistency of course delivery.

And finally, we are not trying to grow at all. We merely want to maintain our Mercedes level of service at our Honda price point.