Growth Is Exciting. Keeping Every Location Consistent Is the Hard Part.
As service businesses grow, maintaining the same standards across every location becomes increasingly difficult. We look at why consistency gets harder at scale and how central teams can use better systems and automation to grow without losing the quality that made the business successful.
We recently spent time with a growing multi-location operator to walk through sovani, understand how their teams work today and discuss what becomes harder as they continue to expand. The conversation quickly moved beyond software. It became a discussion about growth.
Opening new locations is exciting. More customers, more employees and a bigger footprint are all signs that something is working. But growth also introduces a challenge that is easy to underestimate: how do you make sure location number 20 operates with the same standards as location number 2?
When being hands-on stops scaling
In a smaller operation, maintaining standards can be surprisingly informal. An experienced manager walks the floor. A problem gets spotted and corrected. Someone notices that a team member needs additional training. A WhatsApp message reminds everyone about something that needs to be done. It works because management is close enough to see what is happening. Add more locations and that visibility starts to disappear...
The founders and senior operators who once knew exactly what was happening across the business now depend on layers of managers, messages, spreadsheets, checklists and occasional site visits. The standards may not have changed. The ability to make sure they are consistently applied has.
This isn't unique to one company or industry. Research into multi-location service organizations has highlighted the importance of common processes, protocols and practices in creating consistent service experiences across locations.¹ That consistency matters because, from the customer's perspective, every location carries the same name. They don't particularly care that one outlet has a new manager, another is short-staffed and a third opened three weeks ago. They see one brand.
The answer isn't more central management
One reaction to this problem is to add more oversight. More reporting. More follow-ups. More regional managers checking whether things have been done.
Some of that will always be necessary, but there is a limit.
If every new location creates a proportional increase in the amount of manual supervision required from head office, the operating model isn't really scaling.
A better question is: What can the business put in place so that the right things happen without someone from head office having to ask?
That's the question we kept coming back to during our recent client session. And it's an important distinction. Central teams should define what needs to happen. They shouldn't have to manually orchestrate every action required to make it happen.
Turn standards into actions
Imagine central management introduces a new service standard. The traditional approach might involve sending a document to every location, asking managers to brief their teams and eventually checking whether it happened. But knowing that an email was sent tells you very little about what actually happened on the ground. Did the right employees receive the training? Did they complete it? Was the new standard actually implemented? Is it still being followed three months later?
These are different questions...
This is where we believe technology should do more of the heavy lifting. A company should be able to define its standards centrally and let the system translate them into the appropriate actions across the organization. Training should automatically reach the employees who need it. Operational and brand checks should be assigned to the right people, at the right locations, at the required frequency. Completion should be visible centrally without managers chasing updates. And when something isn't happening as expected, management should know where attention is actually required.
The objective isn't to remove managers from the process. It's to remove the administrative work that prevents them from focusing on the exceptions that actually need management.
Consistency is part of the customer experience
There is a commercial reason to get this right. The Service-Profit Chain research developed at Harvard Business School established the relationship between the support provided to employees, the value they create for customers, customer satisfaction and loyalty, and ultimately business growth and profitability.²
For service businesses, this relationship is particularly important because so much of the product is delivered by people. A beautifully written standard has no value to the customer if nobody follows it. A training program has limited value if employees complete it once and the learning is never reinforced. And a quality check has limited value if the results sit in a spreadsheet that nobody acts on. The real value comes from connecting these things.
Teach people what good looks like. Make the expected actions clear. Verify that they happen. Identify the gaps. Improve. Repeat.
That is how standards become part of daily operations rather than documents sitting somewhere in the business.
Building for the next stage of growth
This is the problem we've been working on at sovani. And we're excited to now be launching our platform for growing, multi-location service businesses.
sovani gives central teams one place to manage training and operational standards, while automating how training and brand checks are assigned across locations and teams. Instead of manually coordinating who needs to learn what, who needs to check what and when it all needs to happen, those requirements can be managed centrally and translated into recurring actions across the business.
The goal is simple. As your number of locations grows, maintaining your standards shouldn't become exponentially harder.
We're also keen to hear from other operators facing these challenges. If you're growing across multiple locations and looking for a better way to keep your teams trained, your standards consistently implemented and central management informed, we'd love to hear how you're approaching it and explore whether sovani can help.
Because growth shouldn't force you to choose between moving fast and maintaining the quality that made the business successful in the first place.
References
Segal-Horn, S. & Dean, A. (2009). Delivering 'effortless experience' across borders: Managing internal consistency in professional service firms. Journal of World Business, 44(1), 41–50.
Heskett, J. L., Jones, T. O., Loveman, G. W., Sasser, W. E. Jr. & Schlesinger, L. A. (1994). Putting the Service-Profit Chain to Work. Harvard Business Review.