The top five ways to scale your startup
When it comes to achieving scale in a startup, people often make the mistake of only focusing on sales, marketing and product development, but in practice, the key to success is the foundation that these functions are built on – for example, hire great people and they will create a great product.
So what are the key things to get right? These are my 5 core factors to focus on.
Recruitment
This is the most important and most obvious factor, but one that people most often get wrong. The critical issue is to hire people with the right motivations and aspirations.
This means that they have to be driven to succeed and be prepared to try and try again until they do – but they have to want to succeed in the specific job you are offering them.
If their motivations and ambitions are in line with yours, this is a recipe for success. For more detail on this, read Mindset by Carol Dweck.
Retention
Retaining the best people and weeding out poor performers are two sides of the same coin.
Make sure people have crystal clear objectives, and are assessed on their outcomes not processes. Give staff responsibilities and challenges. Don’t just assume that options and good pay will lock people in.
If the job isn’t fulfilling, people will leave. If they don’t, you have to question their ambition – and is that the sort of person you want to keep.
Make sure you recognise achievement. There’s a reason why employee of the month schemes are so popular.
Culture and communication
A lot of companies often receive feedback that the level of communication is not up to scratch.
The key here is not to focus on increasing the amount of communication, but to increase the quality of communication.
A good trick is to always consider how the information is relevant to each employee and communicate using the type of language the people you are communicating to, will understand.
To maintain a consistent company culture, be clear about what your vision and ideals are and ensure everything you and your company does, reflects them – You can’t just buy a foosball table and insist the culture of your company is fun and relaxed!
Remaining agile and innovative
Advancement comes from innovation. Not all new ideas will work.
If you do not encourage experimentation and be understanding when it doesn’t work out, you’ll find it very difficult to successfully innovate.
Don’t stifle people with processes (see below) and always be clear about desired outcomes. Allow people to make mistakes and learn from them.
Processes and data
Small companies tend to rely on hunches, which, when data isn’t available is often a successful way of operating.
As your company’s size increases, the need for hard data for decision-making becomes imperative. A permanent finance director usually arrives around this stage.
You also need a clear picture of the profitability of different departments, products or clients.
Many people think scale will solve their profit problem, but scaling based on unprofitable customer acquisition, or products, or clients is not sustainable.
Find out more about scaling your startup at the upcoming Scaling Startups event on September 12th.
Ben Fletcher has more than 15 years’ experience in managing growth companies and is helping TalentPuzzle to organise Scaling startups on the 12th September. He’s always keen to share advice on avoiding the pitfalls of achieving scale in a startup, as well as learnings from mistakes he has made along the way, find out more here.