When you grow a business by adding functions – accounts, sales, customer service, warehousing, delivery – you inevitably add overhead.  Because every new function you add introduces the need for handovers, often several of them.   Running the business becomes a matter of co-ordinating handovers and catching the things that fall between functions, rather than making and keeping promises to customers.

All of this costs money.   You’ve introduced transaction costs.   At the extreme, the thing the business is supposedly here to do is the thing that suffers – because it’s the only part that can give.   So you get turkey twizzlers for school dinners at a higher cost than if a local dinner lady cooked from scratch every day.

The answer is to pick a unit of growth that’s focused on the customer, and replicate it.   That unit is the process of making and keeping a promise to them.

Let one Role run the entire process of making and keeping a promise to a customer from beginning to end, with no handovers, no transaction costs, no overhead, and you’ve got a recipe for efficient scalability, that works within the firm and beyond.  It’s also more fun for the people running the process.

More efficiency, more impact, more fun.   What’s not to like?