Growth means different things to different organizations. Some organization measure growth by increases in revenue, widened customer base, or expansions to new markets. However, these numbers often don’t capture the internal growth that occurs along the way– how those products improved over time, how valued your customers feel, or the insights gained from product research.

When ROI’s co-founder, Seth Saeugling, was a high school special education teacher, he worked for a group of schools with an aggressive growth plan. The organization started with five schools and planned to expand to twenty-five in the upcoming years, and eventually hundreds more throughout the country. When the organization needed a new CEO, one candidate was brought in to interview, but rejected the job due to this growth plan. Instead of expanding to more schools, the candidate suggested using the existing schools as labs, figuring out what worked and didn’t work in their practices, and using those insights to improve the schools. Then, they would later send their findings to other schools.

After two of the organization’s schools shut down, they began investing in the remaining schools more deeply as the candidate had suggested. Using the insights they gained in their research, the schools improved their graduation rate and made numerous long-lasting improvements.

This anecdote holds a powerful lesson about scaling your organization. While a traditional approach to scale often includes aggressive strategies, doing internal work to improve your organization can lead to stronger results. Let us share how ROI scales ideas and insights to help grow our organization and provide ideas for how you can do the same.

The Pros and Cons of Traditional Scale

The concept of traditional scale involves a conventional view of how an organization grows—usually involving profits or units sold. At ROI, our products include our workshops and trainings. If we used a traditional scale to measure our growth, we’d strive to expand our curriculum to as many communities as possible and focus on increasing our reach.

While this type of growth is beneficial in some organizations, it can have cons in nonprofit settings. Aggressive expansion to other communities means that you will be in charge of running programs in many places. This means your team is responsible for any problems that arise, even if the issue is thousands of miles away. 

If your team doesn’t have experience living in the communities you expand to, it can also lead to additional problems. It can be difficult to understand a different community without local insights, which might make your curriculum less effective. Local leaders can understand their community’s unique attributes and issues, and therefore may be better equipped to do the work there.

How ROI Thinks About Scale

While expanding to other communities creates challenges, you can still grow by building a network. At ROI, instead of expanding our organization to multiple cities or states, we focus on sharing ideas and insights with partner organizations. By investing in distributed leadership, we’re able to share our message with other groups without creating additional overhead. Sharing and receiving insights from other communities also gives us a chance to build local context; when we can understand the needs of another place from our local contacts, we can adjust our curriculum to address those needs more effectively.

A great way to think of this type of growth is to consider whether your organization is a multiplier or a simplifier. A multiplier is a person or group that wants to share their ideas with other networks. In contrast, a simplifier is a person or group who wants to figure out how to solve a problem. We consider ROI to be a simplifier organization; we focus on our strengths and strategically use insights we learn from experiences within our organization. Those insights help us grow and solve problems effectively before we share our message with the community through training, toolkits, and how-to guides.

One way we’ve been able to share insights with other communities is through the ROI Resource Hub. This is a free and open source platform for us to share with other organizations what’s working in our efforts to improve stress management, promote resilience and reduce isolation. Creating a similar platform in your organization could help encourage others to share their insights too.

We’d love to hear what’s working in your community or lend our advice for challenges you may be experiencing. By sharing ideas together, we can not only grow our organizations, but also help multiple communities solve issues effectively by spreading our missions.