Why Growing Businesses Need an Operating Rhythm (And Why Most Don't Have One)

Most founders don't wake up in the morning thinking about operating rhythm.

They think about sales, cash flow, keeping customers happy, product development, marketing and hiring to name a few. The countless challenges that come with building a business. 

And that's understandable. After all, operating rhythm doesn't directly generate revenue, close deals or deliver products.

Yet in our experience it is one of the most overlooked systems in growing businesses. And often one of the most valuable.

Growth Creates Noise

In the early days of a business, communication is easy.

The founder sits next to the team, in most businesses there are only a handful of employees, customers and suppliers to manage. Given this everyone can stay on top of what's happening; in the pre-Covid days most likely just through conversations overheard in the office. 

Decisions are made quickly, problems can be spotted early. The business runs on conversations rather than systems.

For a while, this works brilliantly. Agility and flexibility at the early stage of growth are key traits of successful businesses. 

But growth changes things. More customers, projects, employees, priorities and decisions. Suddenly information becomes fragmented and teams inevitably start to operate in silos. 

Key problems and issues get missed or spotted too late, and founders get stuck in reactive firefighting as opposed to being a proactive leader and visionary for the business.

The business becomes busy, but not necessarily aligned on key priorities. 

Most businesses have meetings, not operating rhythms

When we speak to founders about how they run their businesses, we often hear of the myriad of meetings they have. Weekly team meetings, resourcing, sales, delivery, management; the list is often endless! 

The issue isn't a lack of communication. The issue is that communication is often unstructured.

Many businesses accumulate meetings over time without ever asking a simple question:

What decisions are these meetings helping us make?

As businesses grow, meetings multiply. Calendars fill up, teams spend more time talking.

Yet clarity often decreases.

This is where an operating rhythm becomes important.

What is an operating rhythm?

At its simplest, an operating rhythm is the cadence through which a business runs itself.

It creates a structured process for:

• Reviewing performance

• Solving problems

• Making decisions

• Setting priorities

• Driving accountability

  
  

It ensures the right conversations happen at the right time with the right people. Not everything needs to be discussed every day and not every issue needs to be escalated all the way up to leadership or the founder. 

An operating rhythm should provide structure, but importantly, without creating bureaucracy.

The symptoms of a missing operating rhythm

The businesses that lack one often experience familiar frustrations.

1. Everything Feels Urgent

Founders spend their days responding to whoever is shouting the loudest. Ultimately being reactive and firefighting. This can take shape across a number of areas. 

Customer issues.

Team challenges.

Operational problems.

Sales opportunities.

Without a clear cadence for reviewing priorities, everything becomes urgent.

And in our experience strategic and forward thinking work inevitably gets delayed at best, but more likely pushed to the wayside and ignored. 

2. Accountability Becomes Unclear

Most teams don't fail due to a lack of effort, skill or diligence, they fail because ownership is unclear. Scaling businesses will be messy, job descriptions, roles and responsibilities will inevitably be murky - even more reason to have clarity of priorities and decisions. 

Because of a lack of structure the same issues appear week after week, month after month and are never systematically resolved. Decisions are revisited, delayed or avoided. 

Ultimately progress slows, not for a lack of capability or effort. 

3. Departments Drift Apart

As a business starts to scale and business functions start to form, these functions start to inevitably become silos. Sales has one view and a focus on commercial goals, operations and finance have different views, while marketing is focused elsewhere entirely. 

Each function becomes increasingly efficient in isolation but less effective together.

Alignment starts to suffer.

And eventually growth and scale start to stall. 

4. Founders Become Information Bottlenecks

In businesses without a clear operating rhythm, founders often become the central point for communication. Everyone comes to them to problem solve, make decisions and rely on them for support and inspiration. 

At first this will be manageable, but eventually it becomes exhausting.

And again it will ultimately limit how far the business can go. 

What good looks like

A strong operating rhythm doesn't mean endless meetings. In fact, it often means fewer meetings and at the start should focus on being as simple as possible. 

The difference is that each interaction has a clear purpose, with clear inputs and outputs. 

Weekly meetings focus on execution.

Monthly reviews focus on performance.

Quarterly sessions focus on strategy.

Annual planning focuses on longer-term direction.

Each level of the business has a forum for discussing the right topics at the right altitude.

This creates clarity and it creates accountability.

Perhaps most importantly, it creates time for leadership teams to focus on the future rather than constantly reacting to the present.

The best businesses create time to think

One of the biggest misconceptions about operating rhythm is that it is about control. In reality, it is about creating space.

Space to review performance, solve problems. make decisions. think strategically and analytically. Because ultimately, growing businesses don't usually struggle because people are working too little.

More often they struggle because everyone is working hard on different things.

An effective operating rhythm brings those efforts together and should align people around common priorities as well as improving communication.

And it ensures the business spends less time reacting and more time moving deliberately towards its goals.

In our experience, it is one of the simplest systems a growing business can implement. 

It won't be easy and will often iterate, but it is one of the hardest to operate successfully without.