Scaling standards, not just branches

I’ve just been following the Hyundai case that’s blowing up right now. What’s interesting isn’t only the car.

It’s that a brand that big can still get into trouble because the experience at one of its branches didn’t match the standard it should have.

It got me thinking: maybe the challenge of expanding isn’t just “how do we open more branches?” It’s how to make sure the standards we’ve built still reach people once the business is too big to watch over yourself, one by one.

How a complaint became a case

At first the case looked like an ordinary customer complaint.

Someone posted about buying a Hyundai Ioniq 5. After the purchase, there were a few things that, in their view, didn’t match the information they’d been given beforehand.

A problem like this could very well have been handled warmly. The customer comes in, it gets checked, it gets explained, and a way out is found.

But what actually happened dragged on longer and longer. There was information from the salesperson that got called into question. There was confusion about features and product knowledge. Then the communication with the dealer got heated too, and in the end it blew up on social media.

The original problem may have been about the product. But what made the case big was how the problem was handled.

The customer feels one experience

From the customer’s side, it’s actually simple. They don’t really care whether:

  • this is the salesperson’s responsibility,
  • this is the supervisor’s responsibility,
  • this is the dealer’s business,
  • or this has to wait for a decision from head office.

To a customer, the lines between sales, the branch team and management usually aren’t very visible. What they feel is one whole experience.

And I think this is where the challenge is: the bigger the business, the harder it is to keep that experience consistent at every point.

The bigger the business, the further the owner gets from the customer. When it’s still small, a lot can be looked after directly: how you talk to customers, how you handle complaints, even how decisions get made.

But once the team and the branches start growing, there’s no way to watch over all of that one by one. At that point, the quality of the business starts to depend on the people in the field.

I think this is where a business’s standards are really tested: do they keep working even when the owner isn’t there?

I don’t know exactly what their internal system looks like, so it doesn’t feel right to jump straight to conclusions like “the salesperson is incompetent” or “the branch leader is bad.”

What’s more interesting to learn from is this: why could something like this happen at a brand that big?

  • Is product knowledge not evenly spread yet?
  • Is the escalation process too long?
  • Do the people in the field have enough authority to solve things?
  • Or do the SOPs actually exist, but aren’t applied consistently?

When the system was the owner

It reminds me of a problem that often shows up when a business starts to scale.

When a business is still small, a lot of problems actually get solved because the owner is still close by.

  • A customer complains → the owner knows.
  • A staff member is confused → they just ask the owner.
  • A decision looks a bit off → the owner can correct it right away.

It looks like the system is good. But sometimes the “system” all along was actually the owner.

The problem only shows once you start having lots of branches. The owner can’t be in 10 places at once. Can’t listen in on every complaint. Can’t check, one by one, how each salesperson explains the product.

At this point, I think expansion starts to change. It’s no longer about “how many branches can we open?” It’s this: if the owner isn’t there, do the business’s standards still hold?

What needs to scale too

What I took from this case is that maybe, before getting busy chasing the 10th, 20th or 50th branch, there are a few things that need to scale too:

  • How people understand the product
  • How the team deals with problems
  • The quality of the leaders in the field
  • The limits of the decisions they’re allowed to make
  • A service standard that doesn’t change even when the owner isn’t there

Because opening branches can be fast. Getting 20 branches to think the same way is the really hard part.

And maybe this is the hardest part of expanding. The bigger the business, the fewer things the owner can look after directly. Customers end up dealing more and more with the team, the branches and the leaders in the field.

So growth isn’t only about adding branches, adding people or adding revenue. It’s about how the standards that used to live in the owner’s head can turn into a system, and then keep running without the owner having to be there.

When you expand, what really needs to multiply isn’t just the outlets. It’s the quality and the standards.

Honestly, I’m still learning about this myself. But the more cases like this I see, the more I feel that scaling a business isn’t only about sales or opening new branches.

There’s one thing that matters just as much: how the people inside the business grow along with it and can carry the same standards.

That’s what lets a business grow faster without its quality falling behind.