The situation
We had seventy people in one office in Kreuzberg. The CEO thought expanding was too complex: different labour laws, different clients, different everything.
I thought it was only complex because nobody had written down what actually made those seventy people work.
It took him a year to agree.
That year is worth naming, because it is where most expansions are really decided. A company that works well without being written down feels like it cannot be copied, and the founder is not wrong to be nervous. What they have is real. They just cannot say what it is, which means they cannot put it anywhere else.
What I did
As Head of Finance, I tightened the financial processes and put data-driven projections in front of the CEO. Those numbers backed his decision to open four new branches in two years.
We mapped every process end to end, from onboarding and delivery to client handoff and escalation. Getting people to actually work that way was harder than mapping it. Some leaders pushed back hard, and a few quit rather than change.
That is the honest part of this story. Writing down how a company works removes discretion from the people who had it, and some of them were using it well. Losing a few of them is the cost of being able to open a second office at all, and pretending otherwise is how these projects stall halfway.
We opened in Switzerland and Munich on the same delivery process with a different front door for each. Switzerland wanted the relationship and a local face before we had written a line of code. Munich wanted speed and a clean technical handoff.
That split is the whole method. What the client sees is local, because markets buy differently. What happens behind it is identical, because that is the only way five offices stay one company.
As Head of People, I built hiring from scratch across all five offices and rolled out Personio to automate the core People processes.
And then I closed one
Munich never carried its weight. Talent cost more than we had planned and the margins could not cover it. After a year and a half of adjusting pricing and the team, I built the case to close it and took it to the CEO over several conversations until he agreed.
Closing an office is not a failure of the expansion. Not closing it is. A branch that cannot reach its margin is a fixed monthly subtraction from every other office, and the longer it runs the more of the company's attention it takes, because struggling operations are loud.
The result
- Revenue doubled in my first year
- Team growth 120% across five offices
- HR admin time down 70%
- People operating costs down 50%
Why it worked
The mapping came before the expansion, not during it. Every office after the first was opening a known process in a new place, rather than inventing a company again with different labour law.
And because the process was written down, the Munich decision could be made on evidence instead of feeling. There was a standard to measure it against, so the conversation was about numbers rather than about whether anyone had tried hard enough.
If you are expanding
Write down how the current office works before you open the next one. If that cannot be done, the expansion is not blocked by labour law. It is blocked by the fact that the company only exists in the heads of the people already in it.
And decide, before you sign the lease, what number would make you close it, and by when. That decision is almost impossible to make once the office has people in it.
And when Munich closed, the company kept growing, because the operation underneath could lose a branch without losing the business.