Set the PACe: The One Tool That Quietly Systemises Scaling
- claire3291
- 19 hours ago
- 2 min read
Most scaling businesses are run by a handful of core processes. Sales to cash, hiring to onboarded, order to fulfilment, lead to customer onboarding, product innovation to product in-market. These are the processes that are deployed over and over to deliver nearly all of the value in an organisation.
The Process Accountability Chart, or PACe, is the Scaling Up tool that makes those processes visible and accountable. It's a remarkably simple three-step exercise:
Identify the 4 to 9 cross-functional repeatable processes that drive the most value in your business.
Assign one person to be accountable for benchmarking and improving each process.
Set improvement goals or KPIs for each process, framed as do we want to make the process Better, Faster, Cheaper or More capacity.
That's it. One page. Done well, it does three things at once.
It drives productivity.
When ownership is clear, work moves faster. People stop waiting on permission and start delivering.
It sharpens efficiency.
When KPIs follow Better, Faster, Cheaper, More - waste surfaces quickly. There's nowhere for a slow, expensive, or low-quality process to hide. Take one process, every 3 months to improve.
It builds valuation.
Named owners and measurable outputs reduce supplier and operational risk, two of the most common red flags in due diligence.
Streamlined, and ready for AI
The magic comes after the chart is built.
For years, the conventional next step has been to document each process. Write the SOP, train the team, audit compliance. That work still matters. But the more valuable next step is to rethink each process and what parts of it are even necessary in an AI-enabled or agentic world.
For each row on your PACe, ask:
Do we still need all or parts of this process?
Where can intelligence be embedded into this process to speed us up today?
Which steps can agents now run end to end?
Where does human judgement still create the most value?
The first step to becoming AI-enabled is not documenting your processes. It's rethinking them. For example, the customer feedback loop, a process of regularly reviewing feedback from customers captured via sales calls and service teams calls and emails, can be massively speed up and elevated in terms of quality. With simple transcription and AI-tools, near real-time customer data can be transfromed into real-time intelligence and sent to the right functions for better short and long-term product or go to market decision making. A process that may have previously taken weeks, requiring a lot more effort and resulting in potentially far less insight and improvement decisions.
The PACe is a single page. Reviewed regularly and well, it can quietly compound into one of the most valuable assets to systemise and speed up your business. If you would like further support in implementing this tool in your business, please reach out to claire@madeforscale.net
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