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8. Specialize

Stage: 8

Stage Overview

What to do: Specialize

Your role: President

Headcount: 100 to 249

Leadership Structure: 4 Layers: Executive Team

Companies at this stage: 900,000 (3% of companies.)

Area	Constraints	To Graduate
Product	Product has too many features and overwhelms customers.	Survey. Prune. Improved through delition. Pruned items can become cross-sells.
Marketing	Broader creative brings in lower quality leads and dilutes the brand. CAC goes up again.	Grow brand with standardized messaging + free value + big positive brand associations.
Sales	Closing efficiency on premium product drops.	Route best leads to best closers (front end and ascensions). Automated metrics tracking.
Customer Service	Multiple customer journeys conflict or poorly timed with one another.	Create proactive recommendations to cross-sell other stuff and a blended customer journey.
Information Tech (IT)	Departments outgrow general software and need specific solutions. Too many internal inquiries. No inquiry process. Department policies.	Get specialized stack for departments. Internal inquiry process. Staff up if needed. Create departmental policies and service level agreements.
Recruiting	Recruiters hold inconsistent standards and culture suffers. Wrong candidates get too far in the process.	Standardize selection process for all incoming talent. Founder final check.
Human Resources (HR)	So many new and existing employees, performance suffers. Compliance issues and complaints skyrocket.	Setup Group Onboarding (software). Documented Performance Management Systems. Insurance (EPLI). Reinforce cultural values.
Finance	You're still being retail for everything (and getting overcharged). Cash is unprotected and getting 0% returns.	Re-negotiate rates on everything. Cash to yield accts. Specialized finance roles (especially tax mitigation). Internal financial audit cadence.

Bottom line: No one is good enough to know everything.

Graduate by: Create dedicated people and teams for specific tasks.

When you hit “Stage 8. Specialize”

Add this stage your company is getting pretty big. You have between 100 and 249 employees.

Only about 900,000 companies in the US reach this size. You’re now a President with four layers of management under you. The main challenge at this stage is that no one person can be good at everything anymore - you need specialists. Let me break down what’s happening in each area:

Product Problems
Marketing Problems
Sales Problems
Customer Service Problems
Tech Problems
Recruiting Problems
HR Problems
Money Problems

Product Problems

Your product has become like a Swiss Army knife with too many features - it’s confusing customers. Imagine a TV remote with 100 buttons when most people only use 10 of them. The solution is to survey customers to find out what features they actually use, remove the ones they don’t, and maybe turn some removed features into separate products you can sell separately. It’s like turning that complicated remote into two simpler ones.

Marketing Problems

Your advertising isn’t working as well as it used to, and it’s getting more expensive to get customers. It’s like shouting in a crowded room - nobody pays attention anymore because there’s too much noise. The fix is to focus on building your brand (like Nike or Apple) instead of just selling products. This means:

Creating a clear, simple message about who you are
Giving away valuable free stuff to build trust
Getting associated with other trusted brands or people

Sales Problems

Your best salespeople aren’t closing as many deals as they used to. The fix is to send your best leads to your best closers and use automatic tracking to measure everything. Think of it like a restaurant sending its most experienced waiters to handle the biggest parties and most important customers.

Customer Service Problems

Different types of customers are getting conflicting information and having confusing experiences. Imagine going to a restaurant where one waiter tells you something costs $10 and another says it’s $20. The solution is to create one clear path for customers who buy multiple products and make smart recommendations about what else they might want to buy.

Tech Problems

Different departments need different software, and everyone is asking IT for help but there’s no system for handling requests. It’s like having one handyman trying to fix everyone’s problems in a big apartment building with no way to organize who needs what. The fix is to:

Get specialized software for each department
Create a system for making IT requests
Hire more IT people if needed
Create clear rules about what IT will and won’t do

Recruiting Problems

Your recruiters aren’t consistent about who they hire, and this is hurting your company culture. It’s like having different doormen at a club who each let in different types of people. The solution is to create one standard process for selecting new employees and have the founder do a final check on important hires to make sure they’re right for the company.

HR Problems

With so many employees, performance is suffering and people are starting to complain more. The fix is to:

Get software to help train groups of new employees
Create clear systems for managing performance
Get insurance to protect against lawsuits
Keep reinforcing what your company believes in

Money Problems

You’re paying full price for everything and not making any money on your spare cash. It’s like paying retail prices at stores when you could be getting wholesale discounts. The solution is to:

Renegotiate prices with everyone who sells to you
Put extra cash in accounts that earn interest
Get specialists to handle different money tasks (especially taxes)
Do regular internal audits to make sure no money is being wasted

The big picture

At Stage 8, the main challenge is that being a “jack of all trades” doesn’t work anymore. You need specialists — people who are really good at specific things. Think about a hospital:

You don’t want a general doctor doing heart surgery
You want a heart specialist
And you want that heart specialist to focus only on hearts, not try to do everything

This is true for every part of your business:

Some salespeople should only sell certain products
Some customer service people should only handle certain types of customers
Some tech people should only handle certain types of software
Some finance people should only handle certain types of money tasks

The bottom line

Your main job at this stage used to create dedicated teams of specialists. No more “everyone does everything”. Each person needs to focus on what what there're best at. This means:

Breaking big jobs into small smaller, specialized pieces
Finding people who are really good at those specific pieces
Creating systems to help these specialists work together
Making sure everyone knows their specific role

This is why this stage is called “Specialize” — it’s all about getting really good at specific things instead of trying to be okay at everything. It’s like turning your company from a high school (where teachers teach multiple subjects) into a university (where professors specialize in one specific thing).

After you get the right specialists in the right roles, you can move to the next stage. This hyper specialization is what can create outsized returns to capitalize on with your next big growth bet.