Orienting the team for uncertainty — Growth
One of the challenges of managing a rapidly scaling Business Unit is building the team attitude for uncertainty. Uncertainty is at every level from minimum business per month by a team to customer acquisition cost for a business that is growing at 2X or more. These terms reflect the larger board decisions such as Growth rate and Marketing costs. However how do we decide on these numbers year on year?

For a stable business this is a strategic decision that needs to be applied. However for an organisation that is growing 2X every cycle it is an iterative problem. The standard operating process is starting with an assumption based on market data to establish targets. Over the year by closely evaluating the through-put rate of all employees and teams, reviewing the mean, median and maximum performance of teams the base line can be increased logically to achieve more efficiency.
Having said that, in reality we are communicating to the Business Managers who have performed way over than their base requirements that the new minimum has been shifted to match their performance. Worse still we also need to communicate to the managers meeting expectations that they now have to perform way above these business metrics. Further complicating this problem if the evaluation metrics now have to include CAC (customer acquisition cost) and Cash Flow from just the Booked Gross Values with the evolving business the breadth of the metrics increase.
This is a two level problem where a) the managers are not trained to meet these benchmarks b) they are not motivated to meet these requirements. These strategic changes trickled down to teams often sound like the finish line of a race is being changed after the race.
To solve this seemingly complex problem, empower the managers with information that leads them to these decisions, build in a pull force rather than a push force into the teams.

Unit Economics and Value chain of the Business: This logic never changes, it evolves. Break down the complex value chain and Unit economics of the business into simple logic for the team. Everything in terms of numbers scaled to 100 so that complex decisions or strategic movements can be explained easily. Like, we have changed strategy to make our B resource operate with 10% margin instead of 12% hence we have a levy of 2% for discounts/marketing costs. Any part of the strategy like Marketing spent, changes in Supply Chain or even updated Vendor negotiations can be communicated to managers candidly and simply. Decrease in marketing spent leads to better CAC, accelerated business growth leads to higher gross monthly bookings, targets automatically become strategic decisions of the organisation than individual team numbers.
Not only would this become the nucleus of all communication regarding changes and updates in my experience this also helped make my teams become independent very soon. Day to day issues that usually needed resolution from the Business Head became mere sign-offs as the Business Managers were more aware of the core logic. This made the managers inclusive of the changes happening and their buy in came from a deeper understanding of direction of the business.
Training the managers to meet these uncertainties in business metric benchmarks is a core problem that needs to be handled sustainably, detailed out here.