{"id":191089,"date":"2026-06-03T09:58:26","date_gmt":"2026-06-03T07:58:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/factorialhr.com\/blog\/factorial-play\/videos\/the-fact-scaling-service-not-headcount-2\/"},"modified":"2026-06-03T09:58:26","modified_gmt":"2026-06-03T07:58:26","slug":"the-fact-scaling-service-not-headcount-2","status":"publish","type":"factorial_video","link":"https:\/\/factorialhr.co.uk\/blog\/factorial-play\/videos\/the-fact-scaling-service-not-headcount-2\/","title":{"rendered":"The Fact: Scaling Service, Not Headcount"},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_video_type":"highlight","_related_series":182879,"_related_episode":191081,"_related_season":0,"_video_source":"vimeo","_youtube_video_id":"","_vimeo_video_id":"1197645218","_speaker_id":167718,"_video_description":"Xavier Virgili, VP of Customer Experience at Factorial, emphasizes the significance of effective leadership and team management in driving organizational success. He advocates for a flat organizational structure to enhance communication and ensure managers are closely connected to daily operations, maintaining a recommended ratio of three to seven direct reports. Virgili highlights the importance of automating repetitive tasks to free up time for individual contributors, ultimately improving employee satisfaction and customer problem-solving capabilities. He stresses the need for organizations to have the right processes and to cultivate core values such as humility, proactivity, and tolerance for mistakes, which foster a responsive and agile work environment. This analysis by Xavier Virgili underscores the necessity of aligning team structure with growth expectations and establishing clear career plans for employees. Don\u2019t miss more tips and insights on effective leadership in the full episode.","_video_transcription":"00:10 - Hello, I'm Xavi Virgili, VP of Customer Experience at Factorial.\n00:14 - I would say that my job is basically solve problems.\n00:17 - I've been working for over 17 years now, and I have been working in different industries, from construction to consultancy,to airlines, to delivery, and now in SaaS.\n00:28 - Right now, I'm the leader of a team of more than 300 people,basically covering all the experience of our customers in Factorial.\n00:35 - And the day-to-day of my team is basically solve the needs of our customers and make the experience enjoyable.\n00:45 - In big organizations, having the right dimensioning on the structure is key.\n00:49 - One of the big things that we need to take into account is how far are our managers from the day-to-day of the operation of the organization.\n00:58 - In my case, I try to get the organization as flat as possible,because I want my leaders to be on the day-to-day to know what's happening to my customers.\n01:07 - That means that I need to have an eye basically on the ratio in between the different managers and the individual contributors that are reporting into them.\n01:15 - From my experience, the ratio should be in between three and seven direct reports. I know that we have different organizations that can be more vertical or more horizontal.\n01:26 - Each of them have different, let's say, advantages and inconvenience. If you have a very vertical organization,what is going to happen is that everybody will have time to dedicate to their individual contributors or to their reportees, which will increase, if done well, the employee satisfaction.\n01:42 - The counterpart, however, is that managers will be far from the day-to-day basics of the individual contributors, and probably that would mean that they will try to get people that tell them or that checks that the organization is doing what they need or what they want the organization to do. That means that we will have an increase in overheads.\n02:01 - That means that we will have more people, and more people usually needs more coordination, which means more meetings, more time spent on that,less time on day-to-day basics of the organization, and the organization tends to slow down. If you want to avoid this, what you would do is you would try to flatten the organization.\n02:19 - By doing so, you will increase the amount of individual contributors of each of the managers and keep the managers closer to the day-to-day.\n02:26 - What will happen then is that the workload of the different managers will be higher. The time that they will be able to dedicate to each of the individual contributors will be lower, and therefore, there could be some degree of stress within the organization.\n02:47 - The other thing that it's important is try to get the most out of the time that you have with your team, because number of hours, it's limited. Therefore, automations play a key role here.\n02:58 - What you should automate? Well, basically, the first thing you should automate are the repetitive tasks that can easily be taken out of the burden of your individual contributors.\n03:08 - These are the tasks that no one wants to do and that is taking time.\n03:12 - This should be the first thing. With this, you will get two advantages.\n03:16 - First of all, your individual contributors will be happier because they won't have to get to do these things that usually they don't like to.\n03:22 - And the second thing is you will free up from these individual contributors to have time to solve the problems of the customers, which is where the value is added. On the other side, you will move on later on automating more complex problems and being able to deliver additional value to your customers.\n03:40 - But the end goal is always the same: to have more time for the customers, to have more time for the operations, to have more time to grow.\n03:54 - There are times where the KPI can be telling you that you are over-dimensioned, and this happens, and we have examples in our organization.\n04:05 - When you have an SLA that it's getting to 99% all the time, then that means that probably you are, let's say, too good at it.\n04:12 - The meaning that you basically streamlined the process, and right now,the size of your team is enough to cover more demand.\n04:19 - Here is when you need to ask yourself a question:Is my company going to grow fast? Therefore, would I need this team and these processes to cover 30, 40, 50% of the demand, or increase in demand the next three to six months? If so, then the thing that you need to do is prepare the team for that, that you are correctly dimensioned.\n04:41 - You will be able to cover this demand and go back to an SLA compliance of 95, 93, 97%, ideally 95 to 97%, obviously. But if no, then you will need to start thinking on,\"What I'm going to do with this team, which is going to be the place I can move them to so they add the maximum value to our customers?\" So for instance, in our case, in customer support,we are right now moving from a really complex customer experience that we had at the beginning of the year with SLAs that were hitting pretty low numbers to right now being over 99%.\n05:17 - Does it mean that I'm over-dimensioned?Well, I have not grown the team since the last three months, but we improved lots of process, and we put automations in place.\n05:25 - So it means that right now, I could take the amount of volumes that we have with a smaller team. But in terms of how big we are growing, as we are growing at 70% year-on-year rate, what I know is that probably in two to three months' time, I would have the same processes,hopefully better, and with this amount of people, I'll be able to cover the increase of customers that I'm going to have and the increase of interactions. And that's the important thing, always having an idea on where am I, what things have I improved, what are the things that I have on the roadmap, and how much the volumes and how much the business is going to grow.\n06:00 - And will I be able to support this growth?That's the responsibility that we have as leaders.So when facing the scaling of the organization, there are lots of different questions that can come up that I would summarize in three of them mainly.\n06:20 - The first one is, do I have the right structure?Do we have the right people, the right teams focused on the right outputs that are going to bring our organization forward, that are going to deliver the value to our customers? But on top of that, the question is also, do I have the right layers on the organization? Do I have the right ratio in between managers and individual contributors and managers on managers?\n06:43 - Second question would be, do we have these right processes in place?\n06:47 - Do we have the right automations?And this needs an evaluation. This needs to know what's the customer life cycle within the different parts of the organization. What should be the right touch points that you should have, and how you can deliver this value as fast as possible and with the least friction as possible.\n07:12 - This will trigger some processes within the organization.\n07:14 - Please do only the ones that are strictly necessary.\n07:16 - Do not create processes for the sake of processes.\n07:19 - And the third one is the behaviors.What are the right behaviors that you want in your organization?\n07:25 - Because the right behaviors will drive you faster scalability.\n07:28 - And for me,having humbleness, proactivity, and tolerance to mistakes are the three ones that needs to be pushed in nearly all organizations. Because when you go in a fast environment, when you're growing so fast,you will always commit some mistakes.\n07:45 - There are always flaws somewhere.There's a part of the process that it's not working.\n07:49 - You will have to fix it, but the individual contributors and the teams need to stand up and be able to jump into the problem and solve the problem, even if that's out of their scope.\n08:00 - Because this is basically what will make you and your team grow. This is what will make your organization to move faster than competitors. And this is what will make the team to succeed.","_has_trailer":false,"_trailer_vimeo_id":""},"categories":[938],"factorial-categories":[],"class_list":["post-191089","factorial_video","type-factorial_video","status-publish","hentry","category-process-management"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Fact: Scaling Service, Not Headcount | Factorial<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/factorialhr.co.uk\/blog\/factorial-play\/videos\/the-fact-scaling-service-not-headcount-2\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_GB\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Fact: Scaling Service, Not Headcount\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/factorialhr.co.uk\/blog\/factorial-play\/videos\/the-fact-scaling-service-not-headcount-2\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Factorial\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/people\/Factorial\/100064908455810\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/factorialhr.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/17131146\/factorial-open-graph.png\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1200\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"628\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/png\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@factorialapp\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/factorialhr.co.uk\/blog\/factorial-play\/videos\/the-fact-scaling-service-not-headcount-2\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/factorialhr.co.uk\/blog\/factorial-play\/videos\/the-fact-scaling-service-not-headcount-2\/\",\"name\":\"The Fact: Scaling Service, Not Headcount | Factorial\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/factorialhr.co.uk\/blog\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2026-06-03T07:58:26+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2026-06-03T07:58:26+00:00\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-GB\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/factorialhr.co.uk\/blog\/factorial-play\/videos\/the-fact-scaling-service-not-headcount-2\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/factorialhr.co.uk\/blog\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/factorialhr.co.uk\/blog\/\",\"name\":\"Factorial\",\"description\":\"\",\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/factorialhr.co.uk\/blog\/#organization\"},\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/factorialhr.co.uk\/blog\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-GB\"},{\"@type\":\"Organization\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/factorialhr.co.uk\/blog\/#organization\",\"name\":\"All-in-one business management software - Factorial\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/factorialhr.co.uk\/blog\/\",\"logo\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-GB\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/factorialhr.co.uk\/blog\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/factorialhr.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/18155144\/factorial-logo.png\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/factorialhr.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/18155144\/factorial-logo.png\",\"width\":946,\"height\":880,\"caption\":\"All-in-one business management software - Factorial\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/factorialhr.co.uk\/blog\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/\"},\"sameAs\":[\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/people\/Factorial\/100064908455810\/\",\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/factorialapp\",\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/company\/factorialhr\",\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/@factorialmedia\",\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/factorial\/#\"]}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO Premium plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"The Fact: Scaling Service, Not Headcount | Factorial","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/factorialhr.co.uk\/blog\/factorial-play\/videos\/the-fact-scaling-service-not-headcount-2\/","og_locale":"en_GB","og_type":"article","og_title":"The Fact: Scaling Service, Not Headcount","og_url":"https:\/\/factorialhr.co.uk\/blog\/factorial-play\/videos\/the-fact-scaling-service-not-headcount-2\/","og_site_name":"Factorial","article_publisher":"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/people\/Factorial\/100064908455810\/","og_image":[{"width":1200,"height":628,"url":"https:\/\/factorialhr.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/17131146\/factorial-open-graph.png","type":"image\/png"}],"twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_site":"@factorialapp","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/factorialhr.co.uk\/blog\/factorial-play\/videos\/the-fact-scaling-service-not-headcount-2\/","url":"https:\/\/factorialhr.co.uk\/blog\/factorial-play\/videos\/the-fact-scaling-service-not-headcount-2\/","name":"The Fact: Scaling Service, Not Headcount | Factorial","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/factorialhr.co.uk\/blog\/#website"},"datePublished":"2026-06-03T07:58:26+00:00","dateModified":"2026-06-03T07:58:26+00:00","inLanguage":"en-GB","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/factorialhr.co.uk\/blog\/factorial-play\/videos\/the-fact-scaling-service-not-headcount-2\/"]}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/factorialhr.co.uk\/blog\/#website","url":"https:\/\/factorialhr.co.uk\/blog\/","name":"Factorial","description":"","publisher":{"@id":"https:\/\/factorialhr.co.uk\/blog\/#organization"},"potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/factorialhr.co.uk\/blog\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}],"inLanguage":"en-GB"},{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https:\/\/factorialhr.co.uk\/blog\/#organization","name":"All-in-one business management software - Factorial","url":"https:\/\/factorialhr.co.uk\/blog\/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-GB","@id":"https:\/\/factorialhr.co.uk\/blog\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/factorialhr.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/18155144\/factorial-logo.png","contentUrl":"https:\/\/factorialhr.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/18155144\/factorial-logo.png","width":946,"height":880,"caption":"All-in-one business management software - Factorial"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/factorialhr.co.uk\/blog\/#\/schema\/logo\/image\/"},"sameAs":["https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/people\/Factorial\/100064908455810\/","https:\/\/twitter.com\/factorialapp","https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/company\/factorialhr","https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/@factorialmedia","https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/factorial\/#"]}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/factorialhr.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/factorial-videos\/191089"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/factorialhr.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/factorial-videos"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/factorialhr.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/factorial_video"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/factorialhr.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191089"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/factorialhr.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191089"},{"taxonomy":"factorial_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/factorialhr.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/factorial-categories?post=191089"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}