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

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

Learn more about Ryan, Anna, and Tamara:

• Ryan Lazanis – futurefirmaccelerate.com
• Anna Wolf – superscriptmarketing.com
• Tamara Kemper – trainual.com

Learn more about Susan:

• Scalespark Dollars + Decisions Roundtable
• Twitter @ScaleSpark
• LinkedIn @thesusanboles

Grab your free ticket to the Autonomous Creative Conference for May 13-15 at beyondmargins.com/autonomous