Businesses or software applications are built to solve a particular problem, serve a particular customer, and of course to make some money. When they start as a 5-person team, it is easy to know who has access to what, who joins and leaves the team, and to keep overhead costs to a minimum. That careful management in the early foundation of the business is what leads to growth in the form of revenue, team members, and customers, and it is a rush that fuels leaders every day.
In my time working with large and small clients, these are some early signs I have seen that point to your growth starting to outpace the business foundations you so carefully built.
Employee counts cannot scale fast enough to meet customer demand
[ 01 / 06 ]The problem
Leaders see customer wait times creep up, hurried or inconsistent quality of service, or increased errors or mistakes, and the natural conclusion many have is to hire additional employees or contractors. Recruiting the right people to hire is difficult enough as it is, but the highly manual and time consuming onboarding processes, access request tickets to IT, and a lack of training resources is delaying the impact you expected by hiring them in the first place.
The Meralis Method
Examine the current access of your existing team, determine where we may need greater separation of duties, and explore methods to automate the creation of the accounts and appropriate access to improve the first-day experience of your new hires. In addition, build training resources that free up your existing employees and give your new hires what they need to succeed.
Software licensing costs skyrocket without expected returns
[ 02 / 06 ]The problem
Your IT Team is already working hard to keep your systems up and running, and without any clear guidelines about who gets access to what it is very easy to give access and exhaust your software licenses. Many vendors will happily let you buy additional licenses outside of your yearly contract negotiations, for a premium.
The Meralis Method
Establish clear guidelines for who gets access to what by default, who approves, and force all requests to use one process and improve license use forecasting, so that when your renewal comes up you know exactly how many licenses you need to increase or reduce and get the best price.
Deploying, tracking, securing, and maintaining computers feels nearly impossible
[ 03 / 06 ]The problem
Every time a new team member onboards, whether they are assigned their own or use a shared computer, it quickly becomes a daunting task to deploy, track, secure, and maintain these computers as your team grows.
The Meralis Method
Mobile Device Management (MDM) can be used to define and set on-device policies, deploy exactly the applications and security settings to your computers consistently, and secure customer and business data.
Customer loss due to governance and security scrutiny
[ 04 / 06 ]The problem
Whether it is due to government regulations or their own internal risk appetite, many large and growing companies are examining all software that is coming into their business with greater scrutiny. If you are unable to provide answers to their vendor assessment questions, many customers are walking away from deals, because the cost of data breaches and hackers is simply too high for them to allow what they perceive as a potential risk to their operations.
The Meralis Method
Create documentation that will allow you to answer customer vendor assessment questions with consistent responses. This will improve your prospective and existing customers' confidence that working with you does not increase their risk, and ensures that you can pass any regulatory compliance commitments that you may have.
AI adoption is ungoverned and causing harm to your reputation
[ 05 / 06 ]The problem
The news cycle, social media, and every podcast out there is promising 10x returns to employees and leaders who incorporate AI into their business tasks. Employees are listening and adopting any flashy, new AI model that promises to help them do good work faster. However, the potential they have to help is also weighed against an equal or greater chance of creating any number of problems including: insufficient or poor quality model training providing bad experiences, ethical lapses by models impacting your reputation, or bad actors manipulating your agent into giving them information that they should not have.
The Meralis Method
We create two complementary forces to reduce your risk: create AI Governance and AI Security policies. These two policy stacks create a way for you to enact controls to prevent, detect, and respond to the risks that AI agents introduce to our company and truly realize the promises you were sold. It also creates a resource for em
Large implementations or process changes are no longer efficiently adopted
[ 06 / 06 ]The problem
Change is inevitable in an organization, whether it is new software, new process, responsibility shift, or a physical change in an office. Without proper preparation in regards to identifying who will be affected, how to communicate the change best, and measure the adoption over time, the likelihood of seeing the benefits of the adoption of this change will take longer and cost significantly more.
The Meralis Method
Build a clear change management plan that includes everything from everyone impacted, communication channels, and monitoring and reacting to any blockers to adoption as the change happens.
This article is general information for growing businesses. It is not legal advice, an audit opinion, or a certification standard.
I thoroughly enjoy the writing process and each time I write passionately about these topics I do so without the assistance of AI.