Smooth Scaling

Why do some businesses “fail to scale”?

In Smooth Scaling, Rob Bier reveals the often-overlooked reasons behind the “fail to scale” phenomenon—the low-quality, high-friction interactions that become increasingly common as companies expand. Bier’s solution? Based on his extensive experience as an executive coach who specializes in building high-performing organizations, Bier has created twenty foundational rituals that business leaders can integrate into the daily habits of their organizations to make interactions as frictionless as possible, allowing them to scale more easily, and more sustainably, than ever before. 

Where other books on high-speed scaling focus on strategy, fundraising, or product-market fit, Smooth Scaling addresses the most pervasive and least-understood fail point that threatens to kneecap even the best-laid scaling plan: poor human interactions. 

Strategy, performance, culture, team cohesion, and employee engagement all live or die on the quality of human interactions across the business, from employee one-to-ones with their managers, to team and cross-functional meetings, to vision-setting town halls. When those interactions are healthy, functional, and aligned with the values and strategy of the mothership, they grease the skids for success. But if poor quality interactions aren’t dealt with, they result in the bureaucracy, bottlenecks, and bickering so common in high-growth companies. This can throw sand in the gears of every business function and may even threaten to bring the enterprise to a sluggish standstill at its most critical inflection point. 

In Smooth Scaling, readers will learn: 

• Why the “fail to scale” problem hasn’t been solved before.
• What a high-performance organization is, and how to build one.
• How what worked when your company was small won’t work forever. 
• How to build a top team with the people you’ve got. 
• How to assess and improve the quality of interactions taking place across their organization. 
• How to build a culture that has trust at its foundation. 
• Twenty practical rituals that lead to sustained high performance.

Visionary leaders understand that rapid scaling has the potential for massive rewards but also carries risk. Those who want to see their organizations blow up—in a good way—while maintaining high performance will find in this book a powerful set of tools that will help them grow a business that’s truly built to last.

Rob Bier

Rob Bier is a serial entrepreneur and seasoned venture investor. He is the founder and managing partner of Trellis, a leadership advisory firm that helps growth companies build high-performance organizations. Over the past 12 years he has worked with the CEOs of over 40 scale-ups, including 8 that became unicorns during the time he worked with them.

Previously, he founded and led a fintech company in the Netherlands and a venture capital firm in London. He was a senior partner in the management consulting firm Monitor Group (now Monitor Deloitte) and a leader of their Organizational Effectiveness practice.

Rob grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and earned an engineering degree from Stanford University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He now lives in Singapore with his children, Ava and Nate, and his dogs, Hoffmann and Rosie Bagel.