Council Post: The ‘Four P’s’: A Blueprint To Building And Scaling Any Team

Co-Founder and CEO at Kalungi – Full-service B2B SaaS Marketing. Ask me about marketing and business growth.

Every entrepreneur and business owner faces a similar challenge as their company grows. 

As a decision-maker tasked with leading a company, you can’t be bogged down with day-to-day administrative tasks and nitty-gritty assignments. Your expertise and energy are better spent focusing on big-picture items, like company culture, strategic partnerships, investments and growth.

To effectively scale your company while preserving your energy, I recommend introducing or standardizing these four elements: plan, process, projects and performance. 

The ‘Four P’s’ Blueprint For Team Growth

Company leaders can support and stabilize growing operations through two different elements: company structure and role structure. 

Your company structure will change and adapt naturally according to your employees and which teams they belong to. On the other hand, your role structure is contingent on how each team plans, executes and reports on progress. This is about visibility, accountability and building leaders.

Here’s a blueprint you can use to establish a solid foundation for visibility (without intrusion), accountability (without ambiguity) and building leaders (without micromanaging):

1. Plan: The plan/road map.

2. Process: The milestones within your plan/road map.

3. Projects: The tasks (with specific action items) within your process that are executed on a day-to-day basis.

4. Performance Reporting: The reporting function of each role for clients or stakeholders. 

The Plan

When you standardize your plan, use an end-to-end approach and consider all the elements along the road maps to set accurate expectations, provide visibility, and get leadership or stakeholder buy-in quickly. 

Whether you are a startup or a large enterprise, having a standardized road map that provides a contextual, high-level overview of your goals that are applicable to every company function is a core foundational piece to set your team and company up for scalable growth. To do this efficiently, divide your plan into manageable steps to provide context, direction and timeline expectations. 

Once you have determined this, your meetings and updates will point toward what’s coming next. When you give your teams their own internal plans, efficiency and results will improve as review life cycles are reduced, communication is better, and transparency and clarity lead to less pushback. When you have a templated plan for each function in your company, your future as an organization will be much more predictable and structured. 

The Process 

As an entrepreneur scaling your startup, your plan paints the big picture, but your process shows teams how the job is done. 

Standardizing your processes allows you to stop micromanaging your team, communicate clearly with stakeholders and clients, and onboard new team members more efficiently and effectively. For instance, if your tax accounting firm’s plan is eight steps, it will have eight processes documented in detail in your process document. The next time stakeholders or clients ask about a specific step in their plan, your team will have confidence in providing a clear answer that is well structured and standardized. The explanation will always be the same no matter who on your team is asked. 

For employees at startups who wear many different hats, standardized documentation is essential to business longevity and consistency (especially as your company grows). And as you hire and onboard new employees, you will save an exponential amount of time and energy training.

When you have process documentation in place, you can conserve your energy for answering the more technical, niche questions you haven’t yet covered. Then, add that to your documentation as time goes on to provide further guidance to your teams. 

The Projects

It’s time to standardize your projects — the individual assignments that compose your process. Think of projects as high-level assignments with a strategic purpose rather than granular tasks. If a web developer’s plan is to launch a website and the process is what happens, along with the different milestones, the projects include smaller tasks like building pages, populating the copy and setting up the right settings, certificates and redirects. 

Regardless of the project, document what’s needed with specific action items. As you note action items, don’t get overwhelmed thinking about what needs to be done. Instead, simplify and define how each of those items gets done.

If you are not sure where to start, think about what takes the most handholding for new team members. The next time you hire an employee, they may have a different approach to complete the same projects. By documenting project execution, you’re providing a playbook that allows them to proceed autonomously with as few questions and roadblocks as possible while also offering a clear path for any possible strategic improvements. 

Performance Reporting

Last but not least, you must standardize and document how you report on your performance. Often, there’s no “standard” way of doing something because you can use different tools, platforms and metrics to report on performance. When you perform specific tasks across a set time frame, you’re always being measured against specific metrics and goals, from industry benchmarks to competitors. 

For example, a marketing leader at a software company may measure performance by unique visitors, contacts, leads, conversions, churn, monthly recurring revenue, average revenue per user, lifetime value, customer acquisition cost and cost to service.

Whether you’re reporting to clients or stakeholders, your performance and progress reports are the most external-facing standardization you need. By standardizing function reporting, you can ask for honest feedback on what stakeholders and clients want to see to build a scalable plan across your entire organization. 

Standardization Frees Your Time And Focus 

As a leader, introducing and standardizing your company’s “four P’s” will enable you to focus on what is important (“on the business”) work rather than getting stuck in the trenches of day-to-day urgent (“in the business”) work.

By standardizing your plan, process, projects and performance reporting, you won’t be wasting time coordinating day-to-day tasks or nitty-gritty details when your knowledge and skill could be better used elsewhere. You can direct your skill set, focus, time and attention toward bigger-picture items, partnerships and venture capital firm relationships, ensuring you lead your company to significant future growth.

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