Case Study
5X Production While the Owner Stopped Working 100H/Week
This Alaskan manufacturer and ecommerce brand had outgrown their way of working. They were left with a choice: keep running their business on memory or build a system that can scale beyond the core leadership.
$50K–100K
Saved in avoidable mistakes
3-5×
Return on investment (so far)
100+
Trello boards replaced by 1 system
"Now, people ask me questions, and I say I have no idea [so that they go check the SOPs] because I know that information has been captured somewhere else.
I've had so many balls in the air.
And for the first time in a long time, I feel like I can relax a little bit, because I know everything is being tracked in some way."
— Mathew Scaletta, CEO
ABOUT THE COMPANY
Wildfish Cannery is a family-run tinned-fish manufacturer in Klawock, Alaska, that has provided "tinned fish that doesn't suck" since 1987.
Wildfish produces 20+ SKUs plus seasonal releases that have earned a cult following from chefs and fish nerds alike.
INDUSTRY
Manufacturing & eCommerce
TEAM SIZE
18 employees
REVENUE
$1M-$5M
LOCATION
Klawock, Alaska
Luke Weingarten
President
Mathew Scaletta
CEO
Lauren Mackie
Admin Coordinator
THE CHALLENGE
This third-generation family business has never had a problem moving units. When COVID hit, it sold out of its entire inventory in a matter of days. Even after grocery shopping returned to normal, the tinned-fish trend stuck, keeping the manufacturing side permanently on its toes.
Five years later, demand still hadn't slowed, but there was literally no standard operating procedure keeping the day-to-day from running off the rails. Institutional knowledge lived only in the CEO's head.
Then, an opportunity arrived. A major investment could allow the team to build a new cannery and 5X production capacity. Yet the way they were used to working couldn't scale. In an internal effort nicknamed "Wildfish 2.0," it was time to take an honest look at how the business actually operated — and to do the work to finally get ahead of demand.
The signs were everywhere, in their own words:
"If you look at our Trello, there's, like, a hundred boards."
"Our Google Drive is just a wasteland, an absolute hellscape."
"I want new hires to step into some semblance of a system — not just the chaos [we've been operating in] for the past 10 years."
"My hands are in every little facet of the company."
"There was no structure. Literally no structure. We were constantly operating in a house that's on fire.
All the knowledge existed, but it was in [our CEO's] head. He had just been hitting his head on the growth/revenue ceiling for five years. There was nothing he could do beyond what he was doing. It became very clear that there's no way this thing is sustainable, and if we wanted to take this thing to the next level, we had to get a lot more serious about structure and systems and operations.
If [our CEO] gets hit by a bus tomorrow, what does Wildfish do? Well, it folds."
— Luke Weingarten, President
THE APPROACH
Wildfish signed up for ProcessDriven’s Foundations Guided program. With manufacturing already going through massive transitions as a new building was constructed, our engagement focused on the “administrative dumpster fire” side of the business.
By walking through daily tasks, emergency scenarios, and everything in between, the team got clear on what needed to happen when — and who owned it. "I'll work 100-hour-plus weeks during salmon season… and it could have been a 60-hour week," Mathew reflected.
Crucially, nobody handed them a template: from that self-audit, their own SOPs began to take shape organically, built around how the business already worked.
"[Layla] was like, 'This is how you run your business. This is what your structure looks like, and it absolutely fits, and here's how we make it fit.'
There was no reinvention of any kind of wheels, no lost work, no lost effort.
The way Layla was able to guide us in what we were doing, how we were doing it, how to set it up — all within what basically is our knowledge management platform — the learning curve was severely truncated.
We figured out what goes in and what doesn't go in. We figured out what needs to be systematized, what needs to be captured as an individual task, or a group task. That was not dictated to us or told to us.
Could we do this ourselves? Sure! Eventually. But what is it worth to get somebody who knows what they're doing, has the systems developed already, and that could take us by the hand and do it right the first time?"
— Luke Weingarten, President
OUTCOMES
With SOPs now in place for the administrative side, Wildfish is preparing to apply the same playbook to its manufacturing arm — the framework is already built, so it’ll be far easier the second time.
The revelation, in Wildfish’s view, was that ProcessDriven found the best fit for the business as it actually existed. There was no retrofitting the company into something that wouldn’t make sense for the people who work there.
Their rural Alaskan staff weren't all keen on learning new technology, so changing software felt risky. Yet, they were surprised to find the team’s reception has been strong, with people happy about the change and excited about what’s next!
Key results during the project timeline included:
Took hours of work off the CEO's plate — day-to-day D2C and fulfillment moved into ClickUp; work that used to be "a real drag" is no longer his personal burden.
Moved the whole company from Trello to ClickUp — an outgrown Trello (~100 boards) replaced by one system, launched company-wide at a single go-live event with new tasks and a reporting structure.
Killed the "Google Drive hellscape" (R.I.P.) — over 3 months, disbanded individual drives so everything now defaults to a shared drive, cutting data risk and duplicate sources of info.
Built a hiring pipeline SOP — a brand-new hiring pipeline, proven with a new hire shortly after implementation.
ot communication out of text messages — team comms moved into a dedicated production chat.
Self-corrected the over-building — early over-complex tasks whittled to manageable to-dos within 2–3 months, with the team still learning to simplify, not over-stack.
As Mathew put it, "We're a better company for it."
"[Before this project,] we largely lived in a windowless office building. We had no idea what was going on at any given moment. Slowly but surely, we're moving into a glass office building with glass walls.
What we've achieved is a lot more clarity — we can see up and down, through floors above and below.
We know a lot more about what folks are doing, why, and who owns it. Before, the vast majority of knowledge lived in the heads of individuals."
— Luke Weingarten, President
LASTING IMPACT
“Empowerment” is the word that was mentioned most often when chatting with Wildfish after the completion of its ProcessDriven engagement.
The business estimates that with proper SOPs in place, it has easily saved $50,000 or even $100,000 in avoidable mistakes because it didn’t previously have a system to capture nuances of the business.
There’s a sense of empowerment to continue to work, to refine, and to hone — for better outcomes. And as Wildfish notes, the work is not done: “It will never be done. But it’s going to do better work because of the engagement.”
"We can measure probably, easily traceable, $50k or probably $100k in avoidable mistakes
because we didn't have a system to capture what somebody could do. Just simple stuff that was captured nowhere; avoidable mistakes.
The engagement was a fraction of that cost. It's not nothing, but if we can save even half of that, we've paid for the engagement 3, 4, 5 times over. The value of the consulting engagement…
I've forgotten the price because the value was priceless.
So it was really, really, really good for us and really well-timed for us. There's so much more work to do. But we know how to do it and how to do it properly. We know how to do it in a way that works for us."
— Luke Weingarten, President
To wrap our discussion, we asked the team what advice they'd give to other small businesses in their former position.
“When you’re entertaining the notion of finding a consultant, a professional, to help with that change, that invariably means you’ve done a heck of a lot of work trying to get there yourself. You’ve already recognized the value of taking on an objective third party to look at those systems and help you move to the next level.” — Luke Weingarten, President
