Scaling a Professional Services Firm – Part 4 Prime Heuristics for Scaling*

Prime numbers are a crystallizing way to categorize heuristics for scaling businesses, and professional services in particular:

• Simple definition. They are only divisible by 1 and themselves, yet they lead to emergent, often elegant, complex behaviors. Just like a simple business principle can scale to a global enterprise. 
• Same for everyone everywhere, forever and always. No technology can change this, not even AI. Timeless principles transcend short-term trends and management fads. 

Let’s start with 0 and 1, even though they are not primes, they are relevant for scaling:  

• 0: Every business idea starts here (from 0), most go no farther. 
• 1: You cannot scale a business by yourself (1). 

Consider the first (5) primes: 

• 2: Duality and partnerships – strategic collaborations – co-founders, lifetime clients, pair programming, apprenticeship (senior-junior), etc.; In professional services, the need for a successor means you must develop 2 so there is at least 1.
• 3: Develop core competencies one at a time, for a minimum of 2 and no more than 3; It takes 3 of any characteristic of person to achieve diversity of innovation and creativity (the Rule of Three); There are 3 components of any business architecture – people, structure, and process (which includes technology). 
• 5: Maturity model stages. A learning model has 5 stages – beginner, competent, proficient, expert, and master; A process maturity model has 5: initial/ad hoc, repeatable, standard / “best” practice, measured, and adaptive. Stages cannot be skipped. Unlike evolutionary models, each maturity stage inherits and integrates characteristics of its earlier stages. 
• 7: 7 +/- 2 is the “sweet spot” for the number of people in an effective team – the key building block of a scalable professional service organization, which can scale to teams of teams of teams (3 layers) – 125 (5>3) to 729 (9>3) total employees. 
• 11: The largest sustainable team size, larger ones, for example, of 13 (the next prime), historically tend to breakdown; 11% of hours in standard executive work week – the minimum percentage of business development hours (5) a person needs to sustain a sales pipeline.

Primes have great power for scaling professional services as: 

• Fundamental building blocks of all numbers greater than 1(the Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic). A professional services need robust principles to scale.
• Efficient representations of numbers. A professional services firm must focus on efficiency in operations, resource allocation and project management to scale effectively. 
• Uniquely divisible. A professional services firm must identify its unique value proposition and differentiate from competitors to scale effectively. 
• A professional services firm must adapt to changing market conditions, customer needs, and technological advancements to scale effectively. 

There are an infinite number randomly appearing primes. No matter how large, there will always be a larger prime. Keep analyzing larger primes for business principles. Here are the next (2) primes to scale by (for fun): 

• 17: Projects should be able to show client’s tangible results in 17 business days or less – no longer than 2 days after a 3-week sprint. 2-week sprints work out to 11 elapsed days. (This one is bursting with primes!)
• 19: People cannot manage more than 7 “chunks” in short term memory per “Miller’s Law” of 7 +/- 2. So, stop before the 8th prime. (This example is a bit of a stretch. Full disclosure, research indicates the maximum number is 4 – which is not a prime!) 

Try it yourself with 23, the 9th prime. Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes. Is there a scaling principle for business to be derived from this fundamental number for scaling humans? 29 and 31 follow 23. 2/29 occurs only in leap years, not a likely candidate, but Baskin-Robbins hit it out of the park with 31 flavors. What business principle based on a prime can you think of to guide scaling your business? 

*Prime numbers are not part of lunar trajectory design or space travel. They only appear incidentally in computer science or theoretical communication schemes. BUT humankind has yet to scale travel to the Moon.