Operational Scalability: Andrew Sparks of exyt™ On How To Set Up Systems, Procedures, And People To Prepare A Business To Scale
Your leadership is everything. To the previous point, you’ll never get killers come work for you if you can’t provide an epic work environment and terms where they can win. Winners know they’re great and value themselves, and if you have a bad opportunity, they won’t even apply. That might even be a reason you’re finding recruitment so tough. Hint, hint. But fundamentally, if your leadership isn’t strong, you’ll need to get used to pushing people uphill the rest of your life, if you don’t burn out sooner that is…
In today’s fast-paced business environment, scalability is not just a buzzword; it’s a necessity. Entrepreneurs often get trapped in the daily grind of running their businesses, neglecting to put in place the systems, procedures, and people needed for sustainable growth. Without this foundation, companies hit bottlenecks, suffer inefficiencies, and face the risk of stalling or failing.
This series aims to delve deep into the intricacies of operational scalability. How do you set up a framework that can adapt to growing customer demands? What are the crucial procedures that can streamline business operations? How do you build a team that can take on increasing responsibilities while maintaining a high standard of performance?
In this interview series, we are talking to CEOs, Founders, Operations Managers Consultants, Academics, Tech leaders & HR professionals, who share lessons from their experience about “How To Set Up Systems, Procedures, And People To Prepare A Business To Scale”. As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Andrew Sparks, Founder of business coaching and advisory, exyt™.
Andrew Sparks is an accomplished entrepreneur who built his first eight-figure business at 23 and successfully exited five years later. His journey, however, was far from easy. Andrew faced burnout, working 18-hour days while managing a growing business. Realizing he needed a change, he created the 6 Pillars to exyt™, a system that transformed his business into a self-sustaining enterprise.
Today, Andrew helps other entrepreneurs achieve the same freedom, guiding over 173 business owners in just 12 months. With decades of experience and $500M in revenue under his advisory, Andrew now enjoys a balanced life, spending time with his family while his business thrives.
Thank you so much for your time! I know that you are a very busy person. Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
I got into the coaching and advisory space in 2011 after selling my first 8-figure business, but this was also after spending years working in high performance. After several years in this space, I turned my attention to the small to medium-sized business space, and have since been working with companies with 10–100 people on their teams, helping founders and owners get out operationally from their businesses.
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
One of my biggest mistakes was just trying to do it all and thinking I was awesome at all of it. Working 18-hour days like a dog, ‘fixing’ other professionals’ work thinking I knew better, learning to code my own website on Sundays instead of paying for expert help to get it done in a tenth of the time, etc. You do crazy things when your ego leads the charge and when you don’t actually understand the value of your time.
The reality is, I was completely blind to it and now I know I suck at so many parts of the business at the scale we are now, which is why it’s so critical to build your leadership skills and build high-performing teams because when you do, you can stay in your lane and do what you do best. For me, that’s the visionary stuff, and I know I just need to be great at that and lead a team who are experts at the other stuff. I think you’ve gotta go through a lot of this stuff to come out the other side, but the faster you can close the gap on that feedback loop, the faster you get where you wanna go.
What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
Good question. I mean, the name’s on the door: exyt. It’s what we help founders and business owners do. While I’d had success in business before building 2 x 8-figure businesses, it had always come at a cost, which was time away from my wife and kids. Just before our second kid was born, I ended up in hospital with peritonitis which I nearly died from, and was in bed for a month recovering. I realised during that time how chained to the business I actually was, and while I was recovering, I decided I was going to solve the problem once and for all. That’s when I built what is now known as exytOS™.
It’s an operating system that allowed me to wind myself out of every division in the business and have my leadership team have full responsibility for owning KPIs in these departments, not me. Once I’d rolled that out, I then started exyt and within 15 months we scaled from $0 to $3 million in revenue from a standing start. And let’s keep it real, it’s not like I don’t work cause I do love what I do. The owners and founders of most of the companies we work with don’t wanna sit on the beach 40 hours a week, I’m the same, so I still work quite a bit, but my day is under more control and I’m always optimising for better. The work I’m doing now is helping my team remove bottlenecks that are holding back the future growth of the business, so it’s the right work for where I wanna go.
You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
Grit, for sure. The pathway to here has been paved with plenty of razorblades in business and life. The best way I developed this skill outside of the company was on a mountaineering expedition in Chile in 2008. We were 6 weeks on the southern ice cap, 100% self-supported carrying all our own food, fuel and shelter. Weather conditions were horrendous and we spent most of the 6 weeks bunkered down in ice caves to stay out of the weather. We got fuel all through the food rations making them barely edible and a few in the group threw up blood. I got frostbite on my hands and feet that I still deal with today. Due to the nature of the trip being so remote and so treacherous, I had to cut my foot open to release all the fluid from the frostbite and get back into hard plastic mountaineering boots to hike out for 36 straight hours. That’s the most intense pain I’ve ever been in and I had nothing but the need to get on with it before the next weather front came through, it shaped me massively, and that grit is something I still tap into to this day.
Secondly, focus. There are always other things you can do, shiny objects to chase, and other businesses you can start or enter into. Back in 2021, I invested into a company that was a company I’d worked with for quite a few years. While the intent of both parties was pure, there was a misalignment and the process wasn’t being made well enough for me to impact the growth of the business, so I handed back 50% ownership of the company and walked away. While there are a ton of lessons, my core business grew 100% over the next 12 months because I only had 1 thing to work on. It’s easy to say no to the things you didn’t want to really do in the first place, true focus to me is saying no to the things that would be home runs so you can focus on your current home run, if you just keep your eyes on the prize.
Lastly, my commitment to the outcome, no matter what. While goals may change, the end game has always remained crystal clear in my mind and I’ve pursued it relentlessly.
Leadership often entails making difficult decisions or hard choices between two apparently good paths. Can you share a story with us about a hard decision or choice you had to make as a leader? I’m curious to understand how these challenges have shaped your leadership.
Probably one of the hardest decisions you have to make when building a high-performing team is letting go of people that are just good, instead of great. When you’re growing a business, often what, and in this case who, got you there, won’t be the people that will get you to the next level. So if you’re emotional about it, you’ll never cut the people who were great at an earlier stage of your business, but who’ve now become an anchor holding you back from the next stage. By this stage you’ve already built really strong relationships with these people, they’ve been part of the DNA of the company, but if they don’t grow and you hold onto them, they become the reason you don’t grow, so that’s tough.
This is a very common issue. People hold on way too long, living in the past and hoping for better, or worse just accepting it the way it is. The question you gotta ask yourself is, are you prepared to keep holding onto these people, despite the fact they’re the reason you’re working late, cleaning up after them, and missing important times with friends and family? For me, the answer is no, and the antidote to this is clarity about what someone is actually responsible for, clear KPIs for them to hit, and tight feedback loops so that if they’re off track they know quickly rather than letting it fester a day, week or month too long. To do this, you’ve gotta build an open and safe culture, cause otherwise you’re stuck in a prison, and I’m sure that’s not why most start their business.
Thank you for all that. Let’s now turn to the main focus of our discussion about Operational Scalability. In order to make sure that we are all on the same page, let’s begin with a simple definition. What does Operational Scalability mean to you?
Building a business machine that runs and grows without you.
Which types of business can most benefit from investing in Operational Scalability?
Every founder or owner who wants business AND life, not business OR life. It doesn’t need to be an either/or, it can be both. The reason we work across all businesses and industries is because exytOS™ is not designed for a particular industry, it was designed to plug into all businesses. If you have a product, and you have people, you need exytOS™ if you want more time and more profit, or to set up to sell for a life changing amount of money.
Why is it so important for a business to invest time, energy, and resources into Operational Scalability?
The old way of running a business is being a technician who just says, “This is as good as it’s ever going to get.” It’s 2024, and there’s more information than ever before available to us. You can literally learn anything if you have the desire and get the right help. Most of the companies we work with are business owners with kids and families, and if you want to wake up in 20 years and your kids hate you because you were never there, if you want to fly economy all your life, then don’t do it. Everyone else who wants to give the one shot we have on the planet a bloody good crack, be an epic parent who your kids want to be around, and upgrade to 5-star living, needs to get on board with it.
In contrast, what happens to a business that does not invest time, energy, and resources into Operational Scalability?
Just talking business, founders and owners who don’t invest in this area often stay stuck on the treadmill of the business for life. They don’t get good at recruiting, so they keep getting D-grade talent. They don’t build processes, so they end up needing to train everyone and remind them almost daily what good looks like. They end up doing other people’s work from 9 to 5, and finally get to their own work from 5 to 9. They also never reach epic profit levels, so they’re fighting to stay small all the time. On the lifestyle side, their family never sees them, if they do they’re always preoccupied with work and never present, so they might as well not be there at all. And it’s no wonder the highest divorce rates are in small to medium businesses around the world.
Can you please share a story from your experience about how a business grew dramatically when they worked on their Operational Scalability?
For sure. Many years ago we worked with a multi-location service business that had 80 clients on the books and 2 other team members than the 2 owners. They wanted multiple locations and the market needed their service, so we helped expand from one location to two. To make it happen effectively, we needed to make sure while the business owners were ramping up the second location the first one didn’t come crumbling down. We worked with them to upscale their systems and crms, helped build playbooks for every role in the company so the team could be onboarded and trained properly, talent from the first location were brought across to deliver the product in the same style and to the same values as location 1 and ensure the owners were able to see across both locations with additional reporting without them needing to be there. On top of that, they brought me in to train their leadership team internally so they could develop continuity and accountability for every role and every person in the leadership team. The rollout was so successful that they were able to then roll out location number 3 much easier and simpler than the previous 2 because the infrastructure, culture and values were in place and needed to be scaled. The rollout was so successful, they went from 1 location with 80 clients, to 3 locations with 1000 clients, and the team grew from 4 total to over 50.
Here is the primary question of our discussion. Based on your experience and success, what are the “Five Most Important Things A Business Leader Should Do To Set Up Systems, Procedures, And People To Prepare A Business To Scale”? If you can, please share a story or an example for each.
Get clear on where you’re going. So many of the companies we work with are pretty directionless when they start with us. They can’t answer the question, “Where will you be in 5 years, or even 3 months?” They’re one foot in front of the other and like a ship without a rudder. If you’re going to build a company with operational scalability, you have to first know where you’re trying to go. Like many businesses too, we once brought a company on who was banging on about getting better systems, and it wasn’t until they started did they even really started to understand what that meant and what they would need in place. Obviously, this is a key part of what we help companies do, but it’s a good lesson to get to know where you wanna go before everything else, and if you’re not sure, then we can definitely help provide clarity around that too.
2 . Be prepared to let a few fires burn. Truth is, as much of a superman or superwoman as you think you are, you can’t solve all the problems at once so it’s super important you’re solving the biggest bottleneck or constraint you have at a time before you move to the next one. You have to be prepared to let a few fires burn and solve the biggest impact one first, then move to the next. The way we talk about this when helping founders and owners get out of every department is how to wind themselves out of every single department of the business. But remember, you can’t do them all at once, so pick the biggest dragon and slay that first.
3 . Build for tomorrow, not today. The worst thing you can do as you’re building your company is to build the infrastructure for today. We once rolled out of one CRM in early December into another because it looked like the right tool for the job, the team spent 2 months getting it tight, then realised it couldn’t handle the scale we needed for the next level, and we were back in the previous CRM again by the start of February because the team in charge of the project were only trying to solve for today’s problems. When we pressure tested them for the next level, they broke and we wasted 4 months operationally and 6 figures in opportunity cost. Don’t do that.
4 . Hire people smarter than you is a growth hack. Smart, more experienced people than you at the thing you want them to do is a big growth hack. When you hire people you have to train all the time, you’re showing them what good looks like for their role, and likely need to push them to a higher level of performance. but if you hire up, they’ll show you what good looks like and you’ll just need to dial them in for your company. Don’t mistake this though for just letting them loose and expecting them to turn turds into diamonds. Epic people still need management, and knowing the difference between recruiting solid people and letting them get in with the job and actually micromanaging them and killing their spirit and turning them into task do’ers vs project owners is everything.
5 . Your leadership is everything. To the previous point, you’ll never get killers come work for you if you can’t provide an epic work environment and terms where they can win. Winners know they’re great and value themselves, and if you have a bad opportunity, they won’t even apply. That might even be a reason you’re finding recruitment so tough. Hint, hint. But fundamentally, if your leadership isn’t strong, you’ll need to get used to pushing people uphill the rest of your life, if you don’t burn out sooner that is…
What are some common misconceptions businesses have about scaling? Can you please explain?
Andrew: There are so many…
- “Just make more revenue, that’ll solve it,” said by uneducated idiots who have never run a business while living in their mom’s basement. Profit over everything.
- “Do it all yourself, you’ll make more profit,” yeah, and you’ll miss your kids growing up, divorce your wife, and die a lonely death. Partner with other people, work to your strengths and you’ll have it all instead.
- “I just need to do more of the same, forever,” no way in hell. As cliche as it sounds, what got you here won’t get you there. In the beginning, you can throw time at things because that’s often all we have. How’s that working out for you now? To get to the next level is more often stripping your time away from things instead of repeating history and hoping it works out. It’s called evolution for a reason…
How do you keep your team motivated during periods of rapid growth or change?
Good question, because we’re scaling fast right now and breaking things. Just like any relationship, it just comes down to honest and open communication. My leadership style is very transparent, my team can ask pretty much anything and I’ll tell them the truth. For me, it’s not so much about motivation though. If your team isn’t motivated, then you’re doing a bad job of painting the vision on an ongoing basis and tying that back to how they fit into that. Our mission is to 10,000 exyts by 2032. The team knows that, and they know their place in that. But more importantly, they know how to navigate new or challenging times. You just have to get great at controlling the focus and telling them the truth. We run team syncs weekly where I’m talking to the team about what we’re doing in the background, we run culture meetings every month and they walk away with a ton. All these things help reduce uncertainty for the team, and like I said, just treat them like adults and tell them the truth so you can enroll them in the change so it’s better for everyone.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
Per aspera ad astra is a Latin phrase and it means “through hardships to the stars.” I’ve endured a lot to get to where I am today, and it all comes back to that quote, Per aspera ad astra, through hardships to the stars. I legitimately think all the things I’ve gone through have been tough, but there’s usually been an end to the torture. I say running a business is the hardest extended thing you’ll do in your life because there’s no end to it. If you wanna keep growing, the clock is always running.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
We’re already doing it. My team and I are helping free business owners. Business owners are the backbone of the countries our members live. We provide epic leadership to the teams we’re fortunate enough to lead, team members have mortgages and dreams they wanna achieve, and if we can help our teams make what they want to make, lead their families the way they want to lead, then we’re making true and lasting generational change. We can’t rely on the government to make the change we need to see, so there’s no more noble thing to do than the work we’re doing.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
They can check out our site at myexyt.com, or follow us on all the socials @myexyt or me personally at @theandrewsparks.
Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!
Operational Scalability: Andrew Sparks of exyt™ On How To Set Up Systems, Procedures, And People To… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.