Scaling Craft: How a Niche Business Turns Expertise Into an Engine for Growth
There’s almost nothing I love more than discovering a niche business I didn’t even know existed—the kind that makes you pause and say: “Oh my gosh—someone turned that into a whole business? Cool!”
The kind built by someone who spotted a narrow opening and said: “We’re going to do this ONE thing. Over and over. Until we are the best.”
What’s funny is that it has very little to do with how creative the product or service is. In fact, the product is usually quite boring. What’s extraordinary is almost always the depth of expertise behind it.
Some of my favorite niche businesses from my client work this year include:
A company that manages one tiny but critical moment in the employee journey—leave of absence—for large corporate clients. That’s “all” they do, and they do it oh so well.
A franchisor that equips operators to build profitable electronic waste recycling businesses (an industry projected to reach $250B in the next decade).
And the subject of this article: a company that designs and installs custom elevator interiors for luxury buildings.
Yep, elevator interiors.
Craft as the Differentiator
Vasile Elevator, based in South Florida, sells, designs, and installs custom elevator interiors for luxury buildings. The finishes. The craftsmanship. The details that make an elevator feel like a natural extension of a luxury space rather than an afterthought.
The founder of Vasile emigrated from Romania in the 1990s and learned the trade, becoming exceptionally good at it. So in 1999, he started his own business—this time built entirely around the craft of creating beautiful elevator interiors.
Nearly three decades later, the company is run by the founder’s daughter (visionary and lead designer) and her husband (CEO). They employ about 30 people, including the very first employee ever hired.
From the outside, it’s a compelling story of focus, craftsmanship, and longevity; from the inside, they were bumping into a very familiar ceiling.
The Invisible Ceiling of Uncaptured Knowledge
The very thing that makes Vasile attractive to customers—its one-of-a-kind products and one-of-a-kind service—is also what makes the business hard to scale operationally.
There is no existing playbook for a company like Vasile, because none of their competitors do what they do at the scale they do it. The rest of the industry is very fragmented, an array of freelancers and mom and pop shops.
Which is why, a few months ago, the Vasile team came to me with a deceptively simple challenge:
“We know how to do this. But we struggle to teach new team members how to do it. No one has ever documented how to sell, design, and manufacture custom elevator interiors at this level.”
Vasile’s experts had mastered their crafts through years of experience, trial and error, and pattern recognition. The knowledge existed—but almost all of it lived in people’s heads. The work was getting done, but it had never been defined.
Vasile didn’t have a process problem; Vasile had a leverage problem.
When “No One’s Done This Before” Is the Point
I hear this sentence all the time from founders of niche businesses:
“There’s no template for what we do. No one’s done it this way before.”
That’s usually said with frustration. But it’s actually the point.
If no one has documented how this work gets done at a world-class level, then the company that does becomes the standard.
But only if the knowledge can be applied by new people.
What the Work Actually Looked Like
To start, I spent two full days on site with the team. There was a lot of knowledge to capture—but we didn’t try to boil the ocean. Instead, we focused on the two areas most central to their success:
How they sell
How they deliver
Rather than going extremely deep in one area, we took a wide-but-structured approach. The goal wasn’t completion, it was momentum.
For each area, I worked directly with the subject-matter expert—the person the business relied on most. And I asked questions like:
How do you do what you do?
Why do you do it that way?
Where do new people struggle?
What decisions actually matter?
What cannot go wrong?
Those conversations revealed the foundation of the Vasile playbook: their philosophy, their best practices, and the few procedures that truly define quality in their work.
From Training People to Training a System
The real breakthrough wasn’t documenting tasks. It was structuring knowledge so it could live inside a system the business could grow with.
That system includes:
The philosophy behind why Vasile does things the way they do
The small number of core processes that drive results
The procedures that must be followed consistently
The guiding principles that help team members make judgment calls on their own
The goal wasn’t static documentation. It was a living playbook—one that evolves as the business learns.
The Real Lesson
If your business depends on specialized knowledge, your growth depends on how well that knowledge can be shared.
Not trapped in people’s heads, and not dumped into folders.
But intentionally captured, structured, and taught.
That’s how craft turns into scale—without losing what made it special in the first place.
When you’re ready, here’s how we can help:
A 1-day intensive where we will DEFINE your 3 most critical processes—how you sell, how you deliver, and how you collect money—then identify what people need to know in order to execute on those processes. $3,500
A 1-day intensive followed by a 30-day launch period where we will DEFINE your 3 most critical processes, DOCUMENT them in playbooks you’ll use to train your team, then DELEGATE them by accelerating adoption and driving accountability. $7,500
The PlaybookBuilder Process Cohort
A guided 6-week sprint where you’ll finally get your playbook done alongside 8-12 other business leaders—with a proven methodology, real-time work blocks, and live coaching. Plus, try PlaybookBuilder FREE for the full 6 weeks. $1,500
Hi, I'm Elizabeth
After growing and selling my first business in the food industry, I started Untangled to help other business owners scale their business without losing its soul.
I've been working with fascinating, smart, growth-minded entrepreneurs ever since. Most have rapidly growing small businesses where it's challenging to get everyone aligned around doing things the same way.
Curious about working together? Reach out here: elizabeth at untangleyourbiz dot com or contact me here.
