If you spend a few years at Amazon I guarantee you will learn how to build systems that actually scale. Working with clients at a crossroads in their scaling journey, I am seeing that a lot of their needs are stuff that Amazon does best: building frameworks to grow sustainably.

Here is what Amazon gets right about scaling (and that a lot of mid-size companies can benefit from):

Measure everything that moves (or that is important to you): At Amazon, if you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it. Every metric tells a story, and every story informs your next decision. If you are out of your startup phase and want to grow your revenue by 50%, it is probably time to segment your client base and sort them by renewal size or velocity of purchase, and keep your eyes on that metric at all times.

Never lose the customer pulse: This is so well documented, I feel like a broken record, but Amazon’s obsession with customers is not just a nice-to-have marketing gimmick. The moment you scale without maintaining that direct line to your customers, you are building a house of cards. My clients are implementing regular user experience audits, tracking how customers navigate their platforms, and identifying friction points in their onboarding process before they become retention issues.

Automate, when it is the right time: Here is where most companies mess up—they automate too early or too late. Amazon taught me that automation works when you have perfected the manual process first. Some call it “do things that do not scale.” It makes sense to perfect your manual processes (think fulfillment) before introducing automation. That is what one customer is doing before implementing a CRM.

The great thing about these principles is that they apply whether you are scaling from 10 to 100 employees or from 100 to 1,000. The fundamentals really do not change.

Bruno Monfils,
CEO Excellence Consulting