A look at how service businesses grow without losing presence

David Zey Gerry Pitt

October 6, 2025

Scaling a product is straightforward: copy, replicate, distribute.

Every unit is identical.

Services, by contrast, scale through something harder to replicate: trust, responsiveness and human connection.

The risk is obvious to anyone who’s grown a service business.

The more customers you serve, the less time you seem to have for each one.

That dilution of presence, the way you show up both backstage and frontstage, is the central challenge of scaling services.

And it’s a challenge nearly every industry in Wisconsin is grappling with.

Presence is the through line of value.

It shows up when an employee takes the extra two minutes to explain something clearly, or when a vendor calls before a problem turns into a crisis.

It’s not a line item on an invoice, but it’s often the deciding factor in whether customers stay or leave.

Backstage and frontstage: Where presence lives

A customer’s experience is just the tip of the iceberg.

Behind every smooth conversation or quick resolution is a backstage of systems, people and processes that make it possible.

When backstage is messy and disorganized, frontstage eventually wobbles.

A technician who hasn’t been trained properly doesn’t just struggle privately – the customer feels it, too.

An overworked employee who doesn’t feel cared for will never deliver care outwardly.

Presence depends on keeping both sides aligned.

The pillars are timeless:

• Responsiveness → speed of reply on the front end.
• Trust → integrity backstage builds confidence frontstage.
• Competence → skill mastery drives reliability.
• Care → employee well-being shapes customer treatment.
• Excellence → high internal standards produce high external outcomes.

When presence is strong, customers can’t always describe why, but they just know they’re being taken care of.

Staying focused on customer experience

As service businesses scale, it’s crucial to maintain a laser focus on the customer experience. This means continuously listening to feedback, refining touchpoints and ensuring every interaction – no matter how small – reinforces trust and care.

Customer experience isn’t just a metric – it’s the heartbeat of service delivery.

Highlighting empathy, clarity and responsiveness in every interaction ensures that growth doesn’t dilute the quality of connection.

The yin and yang of incentives

Every service business is full of choices about what behaviors to encourage.

These choices often feel small in the moment but compound dramatically as the company scales:

• Do you incentivize employees for speed of resolution or for thoroughness in solving the underlying issue?
• Do you encourage sales to highlight the cleanest version of a deal (even if it hides real limitations or future costs) or do you support them in being transparent, knowing it may reduce short-term margin but build long-term trust?
• Do you emphasize affordability up front or alignment between cost and the actual experience delivered?

Some business models are built on opacity, and it works, for a time.

But when customers discover what’s hidden or innovative disruption changes the way to do business, trust erodes quickly. 

Transparency often means slimmer margins up front, yet it creates loyalty and predictability that protect profitability in the long run.

These are yin and yang choices.

One leans toward short-term gain and external polish.

The other leans toward long-term trust and internal strength.

Neither is “wrong,” but they create very different trajectories when a business grows.

Take the example of a Wisconsin manufacturer quoting custom parts.

One supplier might roll setup fees into the per-unit price, presenting a single, bundled number that feels simple but hides what’s really driving the cost.

Another might separate those fees out, showing clearly what is fixed and what is variable.

The first approach can feel easier in the moment, but it leaves little room for dialogue when prices shift. 

The second, though harder upfront, invites a meaningful conversation about value.

It not only builds trust with the customer but also gives the supplier feedback that helps them compete more effectively over time.

Amplifying how you show up

Artificial intelligence (AI) can magnify whichever path you choose.

If designed around efficiency alone, AI will amplify yang: faster onboarding, lower costs, higher margins.

But to customers, that same system can feel like yin in the negative sense, e.g., impersonality, one-size-fits-all responses, the unsettling sense of being “processed” by a machine.

The opposite can also be true.

AI can be designed to strengthen presence.

Automating routine updates can give staff more time for thoughtful, human conversations. 

Analytics can highlight where customers need extra support, allowing a company to lean into care rather than away from it.

In those cases, AI amplifies trust, not absence.

That is the paradox: both efficiency and empathy are necessary.

Yang without yin becomes brittle.

Yin without yang becomes sluggish.

The balance lies in presence. 

Ensuring that as businesses adopt AI, they scale systems without losing the relational core that made them trustworthy in the first place.

In practical terms, this means designing AI to support human connection, not replace it. 

Customers should never feel like they are interacting with a machine instead of a person.

The real value of AI is in freeing staff to engage more deeply, not in pushing people further away.

Done thoughtfully, technology can become an amplifier of presence rather than its substitute.

How scale changes the mode of delivery

When businesses grow, the way they deliver inevitably changes.

What began with personal phone calls and handshake agreements shifts into portals, queues and systems.

Leaders talk about “making it a machine” by converting human effort into automated flow.

For larger customers, this shift often feels like sophistication: clean dashboards, guaranteed SLAs, data at their fingertips.

For smaller customers, it can feel like they’re getting less attention.

Wait times get longer, flexibility narrows and interactions lose some of the warmth they once had.

Over time, it can become harder to connect the price being paid with the value being received, and customers may begin to use the service less often or with hesitation.

That’s the paradox of scale: the very systems that enable growth can also erode the empathy that made the service valuable in the first place.

Unless leaders consciously design for presence, growth can translate into degraded presence and sometimes outright absence.

Cycles of service delivery in Wisconsin industries

This isn’t theory – it’s a cycle we’ve seen play out across the state.

IT services

Many providers begin with small- and mid-sized businesses, offering immediate help and local trust.

As they land enterprise accounts or get acquired into larger groups, the focus shifts to consolidation and margin extraction.

Smaller clients often find themselves waiting longer or feeling less prioritized.

In time, new boutique firms emerge to serve those left behind.

Manufacturing supply chains

A supplier who once took custom and small-batch orders pivots toward high-volume OEM contracts.

Lead times stretch for local shops, and specialized needs are harder to accommodate. 

Eventually, regional suppliers enter to restore responsiveness.

Health care

Independent clinics consolidate into hospital networks.

Efficiency improves, but patients feel like numbers in a system.

Boutique and concierge practices re-emerge, reintroducing community-level presence.

Transportation

Regional carriers build their reputation on dependable service and relationships.

As they scale, routes and systems optimize for volume, and smaller customers lose flexibility.

In time, local carriers re-emerge to serve overlooked clients.

Entertainment

Local venues nurture intimacy between artists and audiences.

As events scale into arenas and streaming platforms, that closeness fades.

Collectives and regional organizers form to bring it back.

Across industries, the cycle repeats: scale pulls providers up-market, presence leaks out and new entrants succeed by restoring it.

Trends in service delivery: The return of presence

Something new is happening now.

After decades of chasing national reach and international scale, customers are rediscovering the value of local and regional providers.

Business owners know this intuitively.

When you can meet someone face-to-face, drive past their office or call them directly, trust anchors deeper.

Local presence doesn’t mean abandoning remote work or digital efficiency.

It means ensuring there’s still a person nearby who stands behind the service.

Policy shifts have accelerated this trend.

Tariffs, reshoring initiatives and an emphasis on domestic resilience have pushed companies to look closer to home.

The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the fragility of long, global supply chains.

Communities want security.

Businesses want partners they can see, not just logos on a screen.

And here’s the part worth saying plainly: AI will not replace this desire for presence.

If anything, it sharpens it.

Efficiency backstage is valuable, but customers’ frontstage still crave care, empathy and connection.

The winners will be those who harness AI as an amplifier but let presence be the melody it amplifies.

Done right, AI gives presence more time to breathe and more room to invest in relationships.

Conclusion: Scaling presence and experience

Growth without presence can leave a hollow trail of transactions without loyalty, efficiency without meaning.

Growth with presence, however, creates more than revenue.

It builds resilience in teams, trust with customers and strength in communities.

Every business owner knows the truth at the heart of service: people remember not just what was delivered, but how they were treated and how they felt in your presence.

That is the legacy of service at scale.

To multiply not only efficiency but also care, trust and connection.

The question is not simply how we scale.

It’s whether the future we are building carries more presence into the world or less.