SaaS Scaling Lesson's from a ... Bakery?

The Art of Scaling through Co-Manufacturing

A fascinating conversation with a local artisanal bakery and beer garden CEO, Todd Coerver at the Easy Tiger , recently opened my eyes to striking parallels between manufacturing and tech outsourcing. This successful bakery, featured in 30+ supermarkets across our region and 2 on premise locations, faces a challenge many tech companies know all too well: how to scale without compromising quality.

When Hand-Crafted Meets High Volume

Imagine you've perfected your product through years of hands-on crafting. Every batch, every piece reflects your exacting standards. Now you're ready to scale - not just to a few more stores, but across the entire state. Sound familiar, tech leaders? We may be thinking about scaling across hundreds of companies, but the challenge still remains.

This bakery's solution? Co-manufacturing - partnering with larger manufacturers who have the automation, technology, and capacity to produce at scale. But here's where it gets interesting: the challenges they face mirror those we encounter in tech outsourcing with remarkable precision. Many of the challenges also exist when starting to scale globally, even if you don't outsource to partners.

The Twin Challenges: IP Protection and Quality Control

Protecting Your Secret Recipe (or Knowledge)

The first concern is universal: how do you protect your intellectual property? For the bakery, it's literally their secret recipes. For tech companies, it's our code, our processes, our unique methodologies. This comes into play primarily with external partners as internal teams should already have this covered.

The solution isn't just legal safeguards. Though NDAs and competitive constraints play their part, this is realistically the simple concept - businesses have done this for decades upon decades with great success. It's about choosing partners whose reputation depends on maintaining trust. A co-manufacturer who steals recipes wouldn't just lose one client - they'd destroy their entire business model.

Again, this should sound familiar to those of us vetting partners whether on or offshore. Ensuring that the developer, support , implementation or other partners are held to a standard of expectations becomes crucial. Luckily, I've been able to work with a lot of high-quality partners such as RSM , itD , Grazitti Interactive , CSS , Infogain and many others. They've built their reputations on being exceptional in their own right.

The Quality Conundrum

Here's where the bakery's approach gets particularly interesting. They discovered what many tech leaders learn the hard way: you can't simply take what works at a small scale and multiply it.

Their solution? They hired a food scientist to break down their recipes to the molecular level and then rebuild them for industrial-scale production. I didn't even know that was possible, so it was a fascinating learning that Todd imparted. They test every single flavor with their primary baker to ensure that every piece is the same. From the flavor to the mouthfeel and other components, the visionary creator behind their product has to sign off on anything that they'll do before they execute on it.

The parallel in tech? Think about how we need to deconstruct our processes into their fundamental components when going global or outsourcing to a partner:

• How does information flow between teams?
• What informal knowledge sharing are we taking for granted?
• Which unwritten rules make our current process work?

It's often unrealized steps that make the internal processes work when you're small. The "behind the scenes" conversations and hidden knowledge allow existing team members to be successful. These can not be replicated externally with ease.

The Hidden Complexity of Scaling

Just as the bakery discovered that dough behaves differently in industrial mixers than in artisanal, hand crafted ones, we often find that processes that work seamlessly with an in-house team of 20 break down completely when distributed across 200 people in multiple time zones -- and then even worse when one outsources to a different company altogether.

Here's what successful scaling requires, whether you're making pastries or software:

1. Molecular-Level Documentation: Break down every process into its smallest components. For tech support, this means documenting every click, every customer interaction pattern, and every escalation path.
2. Cross-Functional Mapping: Understand how teams interact. Those casual conversations by the coffee machine? They might be critical knowledge-sharing moments that need to be formalized in a distributed setting.
3. Systematic Quality Control: The bakery tests products from every manufacturing location. Similarly, we need robust QA processes for outsourced work, regular code reviews, and consistent performance monitoring.

Building a Partner Success Program

Success in outsourcing isn't about "setting and forgetting." It requires:

• Formalized training programs
• Clear certification processes
• Regular check-ins and support
• Continuous feedback loops
• Direct customer satisfaction monitoring

Simply saying "we now have a partner program" fails miserably every time.

The Investment Reality

Here's a truth both the bakery CEO and tech leaders understand: proper scaling through globalization, outsourcing or co-manufacturing isn't necessarily cheaper in the short term. The real benefits come from:

• Increased capacity
• Access to specialized expertise
• Ability to scale rapidly
• Focus on core competencies

The Bottom Line

Whether you're scaling artisanal baked goods or enterprise software, the fundamental challenges remain the same: maintaining quality while increasing quantity, protecting IP while sharing knowledge, and preserving your special touch while standardizing processes.

The key? Don't just outsource - transform. Break down your processes to their fundamental elements, document the invisible, and build systems that scale.

Your reputation depends not just on what you make, but on how consistently you can deliver excellence at scale.

Have you found similar challenges in your industry? Share your thoughts in the comments below. If you're looking for help at your company to grow, drop me a line or find time on my calendar.