Every business guru tells you the same thing: "You need to scale everything." Automate, systematise, templatise. Build processes that work without you. I've written about this myself—the power of systems, the beauty of automation, the freedom that comes from building machines instead of remaining trapped as the engine.
But here's what they don't tell you: some of the most valuable things you do for your business are completely, deliberately unscalable. And the moment you try to automate them, you lose the very essence that made them powerful.
The Canary Wharf Problem
Let me tell you about a project that taught me this lesson the hard way. We were working with a client in Canary Wharf—one of those gleaming towers where testosterone and bad attitudes masquerade as "business culture." The project was important, the budget substantial, but there was a problem.
Our brilliant project manager—one of the most competent professionals I've ever worked with—was being treated like dirt. Not because of her work quality, not because of missed deadlines or budget overruns. Because she was a woman dealing with a client who apparently thought we were still operating in the 1950s.
This was the kind of situation no automation handbook covers. No customer relationship management system has a dropdown for "client is behaving like a misogynistic dinosaur." There's no template for "how to handle professional discrimination while maintaining project momentum."
So I did something completely unscalable: I wrote a personal note.
The Power of Direct Diplomacy
The solution was embarrassingly simple and impossibly complex at the same time. I sent a formal email that redirected all future communication through me as director, coupled with a personal message that diplomatically established professional expectations without directly calling out the problematic behaviour.
No AI could have crafted that message. No template would have captured the precise tone needed—firm enough to establish boundaries, diplomatic enough to maintain the relationship, personal enough to signal that a human being was paying attention.
The result? The client's behaviour improved dramatically. My project manager got the respect she deserved from day one. The project completed successfully, and we maintained a professional relationship that lasted years.
That intervention took me forty-seven minutes to craft properly. A chatbot could have generated something in four seconds. But those forty-three minutes of human judgment, cultural understanding, and diplomatic nuance saved the project, protected my team member, and ultimately generated significantly more revenue than any automated response ever could.
The Economics of Unscalable
Here's what the scale-everything crowd misses: unscalable doesn't mean unprofitable. In fact, it's often the opposite.
When you personally intervene in client relationship issues that require human judgment, you're not just solving problems—you're building competitive moats. Any competitor can implement the same CRM system you use. They can copy your email templates, mimic your processes, even poach your staff.
But they can't replicate the judgment that comes from your specific experience, your particular understanding of human nature, your ability to read between the lines of what a client is really saying versus what they're literally saying.
The most profitable parts of your business are often the parts that only you can do, in the moment they need doing, with the specific context that matters.
Where Human Judgment Beats Algorithms
There are entire categories of business situations where automation not only fails but actively makes things worse:
Complex client conflicts: When relationships go sideways, people don't want to talk to your chatbot. They want to know that a human being with decision-making power is paying attention to their specific situation.
Cultural navigation: Every client operates in their own little ecosystem of personalities, power dynamics, and unspoken rules. Understanding these nuances and adapting your approach accordingly is inherently unscalable because it requires real-time human observation and judgment.
Reputation management: When something goes wrong publicly, the difference between a template response and a thoughtful, personal acknowledgment can literally save your business. People can smell automated responses from orbit, especially when emotions are running high.
High-stakes negotiations: The moment when everything hangs in the balance isn't the time for your negotiation playbook. It's the time for human intuition, for reading micro-expressions, for understanding what's not being said.
The Unscalable Competitive Advantage
While your competitors are busy building chatbots and automation workflows, you're building something far more valuable: a reputation for actually giving a damn about the details that matter.
My clients know that when something genuinely important comes up, they're not going to get a template response or an automated workflow. They're going to get me, paying attention, bringing everything I've learned from fifteen years of solving problems they've never encountered before.
That's not scalable. It's also not replaceable.
The Art of Strategic Inefficiency
The key is knowing where to be deliberately inefficient. Here's my framework:
Scale the routine, personalise the exceptional: Automate everything that happens the same way every time. Reserve human intervention for situations that require judgment, creativity, or cultural understanding.
Systemise the process, humanise the relationship: You can have perfect systems for project delivery while still handling client relationships with personal attention when it matters.
Template the structure, customise the content: Use frameworks and processes to ensure consistency, but recognise when the situation calls for throwing the template out the window.
The Cost of Always Scaling
I've watched businesses destroy themselves by automating everything. They scale their way out of the very relationships that made them successful in the first place.
When every client interaction becomes a template, when every problem gets routed through the same workflow, when every response sounds like it came from the same algorithm, you haven't built a scalable business. You've built a scalable way to become invisible.
Your clients start looking exactly like everyone else's clients because you're treating them exactly like everyone else treats them. The personal becomes corporate. The exceptional becomes average. The remarkable becomes forgettable.
And then they leave. Not because your systems failed, but because your systems worked exactly as designed—to remove the human element that made them want to work with you in the first place.
The Unscalable Strategy
So here's my deliberately contrarian advice: identify the things in your business that only you can do, that require your specific judgment and experience, that benefit from being personal rather than professional. Then protect them fiercely from the temptation to systematise.
Yes, this means you'll always have parts of your business that require your direct involvement. Yes, this means you can't fully remove yourself from operations. Yes, this means there's a natural limit to how big you can grow without fundamentally changing what you do.
But it also means your competitors can't replicate what you've built by copying your systems or poaching your staff. It means your clients have a reason to stay beyond price and convenience. It means you're building something that matters enough to be irreplaceable.
Sometimes the most strategic thing you can do is to remain strategically unscalable in the places where scale would kill what makes you valuable.
Finding Your Unscalables
Look for the moments in your business where clients say "I need to talk to Jason" instead of "I need to talk to someone." Those are your unscalables. The situations where your specific experience, judgment, or approach makes the difference between success and failure.
For me, it's complex client relationship issues that require cultural navigation and diplomatic intervention. For you, it might be creative problem-solving, strategic consulting, or just being the person who genuinely cares about getting the details right.
Whatever it is, recognise it, value it, and resist the urge to automate it away. Because in a world of increasingly efficient automation, the strategic application of inefficiency might be your greatest competitive advantage.
The art isn't in scaling everything. The art is in knowing what not to scale.