Why Accuracy Often Falls as Your Team Grows
Most founders assume that as they grow, their operations become more reliable. More hands on deck, more specialized roles, more experience. What could go wrong?
Quite a bit, it turns out. There is a quiet rule in organizational design that often surfaces only after a business has hired its tenth employee or opened its fourth regional office. Error rates rarely stay constant as you scale. They often compound and sometimes invisibly leak into adjacent parts of the business. Unless leaders anticipate this, the organization’s accuracy and ultimately its customer experience can degrade in ways that feel mysterious and frustrating.
Let’s start with a simple example. Imagine a process that one person on your team executes with 95 percent accuracy. Now you hire five people to run the same process. It feels intuitive to assume the performance stays at 95 percent. After all, each individual remains capable.
But whether that intuition holds depends entirely on the structure of the work. When five people perform the process independently, each one’s accuracy does remain 95 percent. But if your customer experience depends on all regions or shifts getting things right on the same day, your system-wide accuracy collapses to 77 percent. This is because the organization has created five parallel points of failure, and customers experience your brand as a single system rather than as separate parts.
This is only the start. As teams grow, leaders encounter another force: leakage. Leakage is what happens when a small error in one part of the business quietly transfers cost or confusion into another. A mislabeled order becomes a support ticket. A sloppy handoff requires rework. A vague Slack message leads to four people doing the same task. Individually these moments seem trivial. Collectively they erode efficiency and morale.
Where Managers Come In
Many founders assume that hiring managers will automatically fix these issues. Good managers certainly help, but even strong managers struggle when underlying systems are fragmented.
Managers often become the human routers of the business. They clarify decisions, intercept mistakes, mediate handoffs and smooth over inconsistencies. Instead of strategic leaders, they become compensation mechanisms for weak processes. As the team grows, the volume of coordination grows faster than the headcount, and managers spend more time catching errors than improving outcomes.
This is a core reason why scaling can feel harder after twenty employees than it did after five. You added managers, yet the system became more fragile.
The Role of Technology and Systems
The way out is not more staffing. It is better systems.
Technology reduces error propagation by standardizing steps, creating visibility and eliminating reliance on memory or personal interpretation. Good systems make the right behavior the default behavior. They reduce leakage by capturing information once, in the right place, and distributing it across the business automatically. Examples include:
- Clear workflows with enforced sequencing
- Automated checks that flag anomalies before they escalate
- Shared dashboards that reveal error patterns early
- Single sources of truth for customer data, inventory data or project status
When systems carry the burden, managers can focus on coaching and strategy rather than firefighting.
Does This Sound Familiar? Here Is How SMG Can Help
If you are reading this and recognizing your own company, you are not alone. Nearly every scaling business runs into these hidden mathematical and operational traps. What feels like a people problem is often a systems problem. What feels like sloppiness is often emergent complexity.
SMG helps companies diagnose where errors compound, where leakage occurs and where systems are missing or misaligned. We build clear workflows, implement tools that reduce ambiguity and redesign operating models so your accuracy improves as you grow rather than deteriorates.
If you feel like you are adding people but losing control, it is not a failure of effort. It is a solvable operational design challenge. Let us help you scale with clarity instead of chaos.
Growth should amplify your strengths, not your mistakes.
Saagar Grover
Managing Partner, SMG Capital