Before I transitioned to consulting, and during my years in federal law enforcement, I ran one of the top-performing Starbucks locations in the country. I developed an operational efficiency system there that was eventually adopted across other stores. I mention this not as a credential but because the experience taught me something that investigative work had already started teaching me from a different angle: what makes a system truly scalable is not that it’s efficient. It’s that it’s learnable and maintainable by people other than the person who designed it.
The most common mistake I see organizations make when building scalable systems is designing them around whoever currently holds the role. The process works because Sarah knows when to deviate from it. It works because Tom maintains the informal relationships that make the handoffs function. It works because the founder reviews everything before it goes out. That’s not a system. That’s a person with extra steps.
A system that scales is one a new person can learn, follow, and improve without needing to reconstruct the institutional knowledge of whoever preceded them. At that Starbucks location, the work wasn’t building something that performed well while I was there. It was building something that performed well because of how it was designed, not because of who was running it.
The organizations I see struggling most with growth are almost always ones where the operating model was built around specific people rather than transferable structures. When those people move, get promoted, or burn out, the capability walks out the door with them. The organization is right back to figuring things out from scratch.
The Starbucks context felt very different from federal investigations. The underlying problem was the same: how do you build something that works reliably and can be handed off? That question is still the one I’m working on with nearly every organization I engage with.