Of course you do – direct eye contact and a firm grip. 
 
But do you know the secret to handshakes between your business departments? Between Sales and Ops? Between Client Success and Billing? Cleaning up handshakes are often the overlooked secret to scaling without burning out your team or bloating your payroll. 
 
Maybe a version of this workflow resonates with you:  
💣Salespeople email contracts with a list of caveats to Operations. 
💣Operations enter data into a CRM, all documenting the caveats differently.  
💣Customer Excellence reviews the CRM to determine the quality of the client. Each team member has a different perspective on metrics for criteria. 
💣Production teams receive a subset of the data to create the product but aren’t sure if the customer is qualified.  
💣Delivery teams receive two due dates and aren’t sure who to ask which is correct.
 
☎ Does this sound like a game of Telephone you played as a kid?  
 
These operational handshakes, manual exchanges between teams, are often chaotic and full of workarounds. No number of new hires will fix that kind of chaos.  
 
Before going down the path of making teams do more with less, try these secrets to scalable handshakes: 
 
(1) Find the Friction.
Ask: “What slows us down from getting dollars in the door?” 
Listen for: 
“It always gets stuck in the middle office.” 
“We wait forever for approvals or missing info.” 
 
(2) Map It.
Whiteboard. Sticky notes.  It doesn’t have to be fancy. 
Get cross-functional teams in the same room and lay out the steps. 
*BONUS* This breaks down silos. Great ideas often come from this exercise! 
 
(3) Count the Handshakes. 
How many times is the same data touched or re-keyed? 
Every manual handoff is an opportunity for things to break.  *EXPERT TIP* More than 4 handshakes? You’re losing data integrity. 
 
(4) Reduce or Automate. 
Now that you see the gaps in the process, what can be:  
Removed?
Consolidated?
Automated?
 
💰 The Result: Growth. 
Morale goes up without hiring more people and teams refocus their energy on critical thinking. 
 
Don’t let your employees become victims of “just remembering everything” with workarounds and anomalies. As Albert Einstein said, “Never memorize something that you can look up.” 
 
Now you know the secret handshake. It’s time to plan for 10x growth instead of 2x growth, without the chaos! 
 
Need help corralling the teams? Give me a call!

Keep turning that chaos into progress, 
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