Scale at Speed (the book)

Scale at Speed: How to Triple the Size of Your Business and Build a Superstar Team by Felix Velarde.

What the book is

Scale at Speed is a practical, system-led method for founder-led businesses (typically agencies and services firms) that want to break through the £1m, £2m and £5m revenue plateaus, double or triple within two years, build a superstar succession team, and — if the founder wants — prepare for a premium exit.

It is not a strategy book in the conventional sense. From Chapter 1:

"This book is, in fact, not about strategy but how to implement strategy."

It is also not a book about case studies or general management theory. It documents three named tools — the Strategy Map, the 2Y3X Roadmap, and the Growth Lab Team — and a small set of supporting tools (the risk register, the weighted pipeline, the UxR efficiency formula, the Client Satisfaction Score, the meeting-rhythm cadence, and the QuickMap) that together make up the 2Y3X method.

The central claim

"Any plan is better than no plan." — Chapter Introduction

Most founders run their company on a handful of ambitious goals that are subject to the daily chaos of customers, hiring, money and pitches. Felix's argument is that any coherent series of defined deliverables, in priority order, on a schedule, with a single accountable owner per task, will outperform vision-led leadership — and that the simple two-year, single-sheet framework in the book is the most consistently effective version of that he has found in twenty-five years of running and advising agencies.

The chapters

1. Strategic Goals — strategy vs planning; setting the three-year unifying goal; the SWOT; introducing the Strategy Map.
2. The 2Y3X Process — the Strategy Map, the 2Y3X Roadmap, and how tasks flow from one to the other.
3. People — building, motivating and aligning a superstar team; the weekly 1-2-1; the Pied Piper problem.
4. Customers — foreseeing problems, identifying profitable customers, and the Client Satisfaction Score.
5. Sales and Marketing — the weighted pipeline, pitching, proposition design and predictable revenue.
6. Financial and Corporate — KPI reporting, governance, and the corporate work required to be acquirable.
7. Processes — turning the new disciplines into permanent processes; UxR efficiency; the risk register.
8. Bringing It Together — the full Strategy Map example; the full Roadmap; meeting rhythms.
9. Emergency Planning — how the QuickMap was developed during COVID-19; using 2Y3X for turnarounds.
10. Finally, How to Begin — practical start: who you need in the room, the order of work, and what good looks like in the first ninety days.

Endorsements

The book opens with an endorsement from Mei Lin Fung, chair and co-founder of the People Centered Internet:

"Felix Velarde has been advising People Centered Internet through the years it has taken to grow into a global organisation… Scale at Speed unwraps for us the formula he has used to consistently quadruple the size of the agencies he runs and advises."

Where the method came from

In the Foreword, Felix writes that he ran startups for fifteen years before "anyone told me there were formulas you could use to make businesses work." After stepping down as CEO of The Conversation Group in 2014 he started advising other founders and refined the method through repeated use. "Their average growth rate has been 164 per cent in the first year. Today most of the companies we work with double or triple in size in their first eighteen to twenty-four months of applying the Scale at Speed formula."

Where to apply the method without reading the book

• The Scale at Speed Accelerator — eight-week online course teaching the method directly.
• The 2Y3X programme — done-with-you, two-year consulting engagement.
• The QuickMap — three-month rapid intervention.
• Personal advisory with Felix — Strategic Board Advisor engagements, six figures per year.

The Scalability Scorecard is a free three-minute diagnostic that scores how ready a founder's business is to scale at speed.