Starting & growing a great business takes commitment, resilience, patience, and in most cases, quite a lot of money.
Navigating through the establishment of your MVP or defining your product & market fit is a huge hurdle, finding and securing financial resources that allow you to focus & grow is another.
Business founders and investors often view business potential very differently. Founders focus on incremental growth whilst investors think in terms of multiples & scale. Business leaders need to set their sights high, think globally, and aim for the north star.
Rapid growth & scale is challenging. When you are starting up you have 3 major considerations:
- Build a great team.
- Build a great product.
- Don’t run out of money.
A strong team can build a company, however, even with a great product or idea, a weak team will rarely succeed or attract investment. When asked what investors look for in a business one of the most important factors was “it’s all about the people – if the people are good they can create something out of nothing and that’s probably the most important feature we are looking for”.
Building a team takes planning, thought, and hard work. Not only do you need to identify the skillset and experience required but you will need to look much harder and further than you expect to find great talent.
Expect to spend over 30% of your time recruiting not just locally but from around the world. And, of course, great teams are not made just by recruiting the best talent.
Scaling up and organizational culture
Organizational culture defines how people within the business interact with each other and work together.
Organizational culture left to develop and mature on its own will usually resemble the leftovers in your fridge; initially they are okay but soon develop into something unrecognizable and toxic!
Just like a business that have defined vision and values, and stay true to them, the most effective cultures have purpose and a direction and individuals are selected as a fit and held accountable.
Building a team takes more than just adding more people, it takes planning how that team will grow together, how they will fit your company’s financial and strategic plans and how you will continue to monitor, maintain & improve your organizational culture.
Most people who have managed a team will be familiar with the headaches of growth. One day you have a tight-knit team perfectly attuned to one another, working purposefully towards a clear goal. The next, everything is falling apart at the seams. And all you did was add a few more people!
As recognized by David Loftesness, there are two vital parts to ensuring successful scaling.
The first is taking a proactive approach to putting in place the initiatives and approaches you know will encourage productive team dynamics at scale.
The second is recognizing the warning signs that will start to present themselves once your team starts growing — and getting the balance right in your reaction.
Scaling is never easy, scale up success: it’s all about the people.
