Engineering Calmer Agencies & Consulting Firms: Calm is the New KPI

What Does Maintenance Mode Look Like? featuring Ryan Lazanis, Anna Wolf, and Tamara Kemper

Mar 23, 2021

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I've been spending a lot of time this year thinking about capacity.

A lot of the work I do focuses on helping clients streamline their operations to increase their capacity without increasing their costs or business complexity.

ScaleSpark actually started as an outgrowth of me running businesses and holding a full-time job. We owned a guest ranch and a brick-and-mortar store while I worked full time and ran all the back ends of those operations.

I had to figure out a way to make that backend run seamlessly and efficiently because I only had maybe an hour or two a day before I went to my day job and I needed to be really effective with my time… which led me to software.

I used software tools to make the operations mostly run without me. Understanding how to use technology to boost capacity was something I had to learn for my businesses to survive. And eventually I started ScaleSpark to help other businesses harness those tools and boost their own capacity.

Even though increasing capacity is one of my core competencies, capacity has been a real issue for me over the last year. So the first question I asked was: what can I stop doing?

It actually turned out that there was a lot of stuff that, when I really examined it, wasn't bringing value into my business, but it was sucking up my time. I needed to get my business back to a place where if I needed to, I could set it and forget it. Maintenance mode.

For this episode, I wanted to figure out what maintenance mode means to different people and what it looks like in different kinds of businesses. I started asking podcast guests and people around me what maintenance mode meant to them and I never got the same answer twice.

Listen to the full episode to hear:

Growth mode versus maintenance mode and how you can be in both at the same time
How the skills, systems, and tools that you would build and develop for maintenance mode are pretty much the same as the ones you would build for scaling
Why process can be so powerful for increasing your capacity, whether that's for
maintenance mode scaling or just to make your job take less time
How maintenance mode affects product-based businesses and how to define which products require you to be more involved and which ones can run on their own