Operational Scalability: Bart Fanelli of Skillibrium on On How To Set Up Systems, Procedures, And People To Prepare A Business To Scale
“Life is about the long game of chess, not checkers — few win by building a business based on reprisal or short-term gain. Many win when creating and executing based on strategy”
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 implement 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 handle increasing responsibilities while maintaining a high-performance standard?
In this interview series, we are talking to CEOs, Founders, Operations Managers, Consultants, Academics, Tech leaders & HR professionals, who share lessons from their experiences about
“How To Set Up Systems, Procedures, And People To Prepare A Business To Scale.”
“The cross-section of efficiency — role-based skills, assets, workflow, and performance management To Prepare A Business To Scale”
As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Bart Fanelli.
Bart Fanelli is the CEO and co-founder of Skillibrium. He is an experienced sales executive, field operator, and executive advisor with a proven track record of building successful GTM organizations. He has held leadership roles at OutSystems, Splunk, and BMC Software, leading teams of over 275 employees within businesses with more than $1.5 billion in revenue. Fanelli was featured in a 2017 Harvard Business Review article and is the accomplished co-author of “The Success Cadence.”
Fanelli is passionate about solving the critical challenges faced by go-to-market teams. He is dedicated to helping these teams’ function cohesively by addressing structural inefficiencies and fostering transparent communication. His work centers on the belief that while GTM teams might operate how they do for various reasons, improvement and progress are always possible. Through his innovative approaches, he aims to align teams towards growth by combining organizational resources, focusing on keeping people connected to a performance by optimizing the cross-section of efficiency while creating repeatable value.
Bart Fanelli is a sought-after speaker, executive advisor, and coach who has recently addressed themes such as driving objective employee performance, talent management, and diversity in the workforce.
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” better. Can you tell us about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
My backstory is common. I was born into a blue-collar Italian family and raised in New York, where my father was an NYC fireman, and my mother was a housewife who never had a bank account. Neither of them graduated from high school. Living above my grandparents gave me many amazing moments, some I’d instead not share. Like everyone else, many good and bad moments in my life and career have defined me as a person, leader, and human. I’m sure there will be many more.
As for understanding and learning how to exist in the business world, I was a late bloomer. After a few jobs and now living in Georgia, I remember a specific time in the early 2000s when I was a young sales rep on a team covering the Southeast territory. At that time, the region was known as a top performer within the company. However, no one on the Southeast team achieved their quota in one particular quarter. This meant we hadn’t earned our targeted compensation and weren’t optimistic about our year’s success.
During a company earnings call, I was surprised to hear that the company had achieved its targets. The execs were touting modest growth, which was good news to the investor community. This was the moment I learned about the legacy practice of broad over-assignment of quotas to “protect” the company at the expense of employees paid on their sales performance. While the intent wasn’t as malicious as it sounds, it wasn’t a favorable environment for sales contributors. The company was winning while we, as sellers, were losing our opportunity to exceed our on-target earnings. This was a wake-up call for me as an employee, salesperson, and aspiring leader.
This experience drove me to delve into the back office, sales best practices, and field operations to better understand why and how such an imbalance could exist. Years passed, and after learning many new skills and organizational design practices and recognizing some faulty HR practices favoring the company over its people, I moved on and forward. Moving forward is my ethos.
It has been said that our mistakes can be our most outstanding teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
It’s funny now, but I don’t think it was funny then. However, this validates that learning by doing is powerfully rewarding, and mistakes are expected. This one was significant because it was — the largest transaction of my career at the time with the largest healthcare provider in the country. We were already established in the account, doing well, and creating a consistently valuable customer experience with many relationships and millions a year in spending. We were adding new technology offerings to drive quantified business outcomes in a flourishing relationship. Multiple Vice Presidents around the table all contributed to a deep business case process to justify the positive outcomes we could deliver over time “in their words”. It was the day of reading out the business case to our Champion and all those who contributed. Five minutes in, handouts around the table (this is ~20 years ago), Champion picks up the docs, tears them in half, and sends us packing. We didn’t start. “Next time you run a business case process like this, I would appreciate a private pre-read”. And off we went to start over. Yes, a true champion, personal relationships, breakfasts, lunches, dinners, speaking engagements, and millions in spend. He sponsored the business case, we missed a step in the process, which shed him in a negative light. Yes, we returned, and he led the meeting; we got the transaction, but we missed a quarter due to our minor omission of a pre-read, allowing him to voice over the results personally. Funny now, painful then, valuable indefinitely.
What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
I became a founder after a twenty-five-year career in GTM (Go-To-Market) which encompasses strategy, actions and tactics to position, promote, and sell a product or service, involving roles such as sales, marketing, product management, and customer support to ensure successful market entry and growth. I evolved from contributor to global revenue officer and experienced vastly different cultures. Every founder and senior executive have a chance to leave a legacy — good, bad, or indifferent. I had the opportunity to join a young company recently led by seasoned executives with a vision of doing things better. After seventeen interviews to get in, my life lessons in hyper growth and balanced GTM design principles were put to the test.
The idea of having input and influence over designing, building, implementing, and refining GTM frameworks globally was incredibly appealing. From 2010 onwards, I learned that a more rewarding model required a fresh perspective on objective performance management to complement efficient GTM design.
As a late founder with extensive operator experience and a skilled co-founder, we have a unique advantage. The early founding team, experienced in both legacy and hypergrowth, adds to this strength. Our operator experience and transparency in how we operate make us stand out. This is a gift for me and the team and is very apparent to the prospects and customers we serve.
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?
Integrity — Prior to founding Skillibrium, I’ve walked away from opportunities where the executive team and investors have little interest in changing, no interest in doing it right, and a belief that product is more important than people. Yelling across the executive table as if they were scolding children when things are not as they demand is not my jam.
Transparency — If you have integrity, operating transparently is easier. However, it does require intent. When integrity is missing, transparency is near impossible. Why? Usually, a web of lies is easily unpackable by those with integrity and experience.
Humility — Everyone has a voice, ideas, and experiences that complement each other. When listening, learning, and sharing, if centered on transparency, everyone can speak about why or why not while gaining more input.
If we bring Integrity in decision-making, transparency in communication, and humility together, we can all live in a state of gratitude and outperform as #oneteam. No yelling is required.
Yes, there are some things that are confidential. However, leading and living with integrity, transparency, and humility minimizes exposure, speeds up decision-making, and allows me to lead like the human being that we all are. It is life-changing, and all based on experience.
Leadership often entails making difficult or challenging choices between two good paths. Can you share a story 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.
I’ve faced completely different leadership approaches: old school, subjective, out of fashion, and traditional, heavy-handed methods — those mired in yelling, hypocrisy, and self-serving interests of oversized egos. Modern, focusing on development and career progression, role-based skills, core progression of learning, and innovating while winning as a team. I’ve always been determined to confront hypocrisy in business through leadership. My approach is most influenced by not being the former and more about accountability through the latter, which is comprised of transparency in the workplace. This reflects my rebellion against hypocritical behaviors, hubris, and overall ignorance in operating, which I’ve encountered over the years.
I have zero respect for those who “make it up as they go,” changing their story to suit their interests, investors, and companies at the expense of unsuspecting employees, even executives. We’re not born with fixed knowledge; we all learn only if we are willing and have a growth mindset. Otherwise, we fall behind. Seasoned executives who are worth their salt learn through positive and negative experiences while continuously growing. If an executive preaches this way but acts differently consistently, they are faking it and are not coachable. They are mired in hypocrisy, covering up their mistakes rather than owning them and moving on to prosperous outcomes with others. It’s sad but true: those who don’t ask for help will die lonely and forever be in despair. The lesson is to make the hard decision and walk away from harmful, fixed, and entitled mindsets and cultures at your first opportunity. You’ll thank yourself for the decision later.
Thank you for all that. Let’s now turn to the main focus of our discussion: operational Scalability. Let’s begin with a simple definition to ensure that we are all on the same page. What does Operational Scalability mean to you?
Defining Operational Scalability is difficult because everyone perceives “how” to grow or scale operationally differently. However, in traditional terms, Operational scalability is defined as a business’s ability to expand operations and grow without sacrificing quality.
For some, adding account managers and business development resources assigning revenue quota’s (an example relative to scaling revenue through sales capacity) typically fails without first being operationally prepared. But it happens all the time! If people, in this case, quota carriers, don’t succeed, or if the scale is achieved in the short term at the expense of long-term predictability, it creates a dire situation. High cost, low productivity, minimal success, leading to a hostile culture, quiet quitting, and difficulty hiring. This is a downward spiral that makes it very difficult to unwind. Think about the cheap money spent through ventures by funding shiny new technology companies with little to no GTM or Operational scalability planning or expertise. Billions were lost, and hundreds of thousands were unemployed in tech roles alone between 2021 and today. If more had taken the time to understand how to operationally scale without compromising quality, the outcome would have been far different prior to hiring only sellers in mass.
Operational Scalability is directly related to understanding operational design, which varies depending on the industry and the underlying reason and timeline for scaling. Whether top-line revenue growth, competitive positioning in geography, or another, operations and objective measures must be front and center. Operational scalability requires experience, management courage, and discipline.
There’s a cross-section of efficiency (value) that we must find, observe, learn, measure, and improve to scale. This cross-section differs for every company. However, think about role-based skills (industry-specific) aligned with workflow (how the skills are applied successfully in sequence), purely objective measures of skill proficiency, workflow adherence, and objective-based outcomes, followed by remediation or role-based skills and workflow learning. You are hoping and praying without such a simple, fundamental, and objectively measured approach. Yet — many have no idea how to do this.
Which types of business can most benefit from investing in Operational Scalability?
Every company can benefit from it. Its application depends on the complexity of the company and industry.
Why is it essential for a business to invest time, energy, and resources into Operational Scalability?
If you care about customers and their experience as a driver for your company’s success, it’s hard to ignore. Happy employees with high skills and proficiency who know what’s expected of them and align with an intentional workflow will consistently deliver a better customer experience than those not centered on these basic approaches.
In contrast, what happens to a business that does not invest time, energy, and resources into Operational Scalability?
When a business doesn’t invest in refining and upskilling talent, it faces several risks. Employees who lack clarity and alignment deliver inconsistent service, leading to poor customer experience. Inefficiencies and bottlenecks develop, reducing productivity and stunting the company’s growth. Without effective scaling, operational costs can skyrocket, and competitors who do invest in their teams will outpace you, grabbing market share and driving innovation. Ultimately, not investing in your talent hampers your ability to meet customer and market demands, putting your business’s long-term success at risk.
Can you please share a story from your experience about how a business grew dramatically when it worked on its Operational Scalability?
One compelling story of dramatic business growth through operational scalability is from my experience with Splunk, a Security and Big Data SaaS company. When I joined Splunk, the company was generating around $60 million in revenue. Over the next seven years, we scaled that to over $1 billion. This transformation was driven by a strategic focus on operational scalability, particularly through alignment between product and people development.
At Splunk, we centered our efforts on developing role-based skills proficiency, ensuring that every team member knew their responsibilities and had the tools and training to excel in their roles. This approach created a cohesive and highly effective sales team capable of driving substantial growth.
A critical part of this success was our decision to invest heavily in our sales team. Sales is fundamentally about building and sustaining personal business relationships. High-performing salespeople are essential for creating and nurturing these connections with senior-level decision-makers. To achieve rapid, scalable growth, we targeted top-tier salespeople, recruited them, hired them, and provided robust support and training to ramp them up quickly.
By consciously designing a clear operational cadence — daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly — we established a rhythm that sustained our rapid growth culture. This operational discipline allowed us to overcome common obstacles and maintain a trajectory of “hockey stick” revenue growth.
Our story at Splunk illustrates how investing in operational scalability, particularly in developing your sales team’s skills and aligning them with your product strategy, can dramatically transform a company’s performance and drive significant growth.
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.
We could be here all day on this discussion point! I’ll keep it short and based on my industry experience as a SaaS Tech GTM. Note: We will not cover the cost envelope or specific technology. We’ll only touch on Operational Scalability from a design, Customer, and People skills perspective — which are far more important first.
1. Define your company’s Ideal Customer Profile and Personas to target.
Companies in a geographic area, in a particular industry, with a certain number of employees, would
benefit from successfully deploying your offering. The role of the person (the persona) most likely to connect, understand, and benefit from your offering.
2. Define your Process, Workflow, Assets, Leading and Lagging indicators to measure
Sales Process, Playbook stages, Collaborative assets (think about the cross-section of roles and customer experience), Messaging framework, and Unique persona meetings lead to lagging performance that follows over time.
3. Define the Role Based Skills and Behavior Profile required to sell to and support your ICP and Personas as — Prospects and Customers, e
Enterprise sales role with Skills x, y, and z who are Willing and coachable (growth mindset). Otherwise, you’ll get skills x, y, and z and those who are not coachable (fixed mindset). When we miss the Willing part or Growth Mindset during hiring, we get stuck with employees at every level who will not learn new skills when required to keep up with your company’s needs.
4. Design onboarding, learning, practicing, executing, coaching, remediation, and offboarding underperformers and sourcing new performers based on role-based skills and behavior profiles.
Everyone learns the same GTM skills by role, practices them, executes them during their job/role, is coached and developed to improve said skills, and is measured on proficiency. This happens on cadence, and everyone knows what’s expected of success. Bonus: your leaders need the same fundamental skills and must be able to lead, coach, and get the best out of their teams in a highly professional manner. This translates to a fantastic customer experience and predictable performance. If your company shifts markets or new products to remain competitive, you’ll be highly prepared to implement new learning, workflows, and indicators through this design principle.
5. Design operational cadence from GTM contributors up to the Executive team with objective measures and descendant visibility which includes visibility of role-based skills at all levels in the organization top down, bottom up and matrixed structures.
Operationalize by incorporating cadence and with clear communication and aligned goals. A structure that recognizes what does each role and its leadership do daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly in sequence: Month 1, Month 2, Month 3? Establish what is the communication, reporting, and coaching cycle within the same cadence to ensure integrity and objective decision-making.
What are some common misconceptions businesses have about scaling? Can you please explain?
Many think they can hire at all costs without understanding and planning one through five immediately above. They end up failing miserably and spending millions to do so, only to end up right where they were before yelling at each other across the executive table, demanding growth!
How do you keep your team motivated during rapid growth or change?
Through Integrity, Transparency, and Humility — said differently ⇒ leave ego, hubris aside, build a diverse Board of Directors, hire experienced GTM executives, and ensure everyone is coachable. The rest takes care of itself (in simple terms)
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote” and share how it was relevant to you in your life?
“Life is about the long game of chess, not checkers — few win by building a business based on reprisal or short-term gain. Many win when creating and executing based on strategy”
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most good to the most people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
We are already doing it at Skillibrium, and I believe it’s going to change lives, companies, and even transform siloed and fragmented industries. My passion is to bring out the best in teams and drive significant, sustainable growth. It’s all about building a culture of continuous improvement and alignment, and I’m excited to see the positive impact we can make. By optimizing the cross-section of efficiency and creating repeatable value, we aim to help teams function cohesively and perform at their best. I truly believe that by fostering transparent communication and addressing structural inefficiencies, we can transform the way go-to-market teams operate for the better.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
linkedin.com/in/bartfanelli, www.Skillibrium.com
Thank you so much for sharing these important insights. We wish you continued success and good health!
Operational Scalability: Bart Fanelli of Skillibrium on On How To Set Up Systems, Procedures, And… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.