10 Tips to Scale your Startup

Lately I've been thinking a lot about how a startup matures and becomes a small company. Whether you are a Software as a service provider (SaaS) offering a product or another model, one of the key phases of your growth will be scaling in employees and customers, once your market value has been established.

Scaling a startup is an important phase and being able to do it will tests your organizational maturity, leadership and the employees themselves.  Have you planned ahead, covered all bases and connected the dots?

Optimize Processes Before you Scale

1- . According to the StartupGenom's survey of 3200+ startups, 74% of failures can be explained by premature scaling. So making sure your speed of deployment, customer success touch-points and time to break-even point is reduced, before you try to scale.

More Focused Roles and Accountability 

2- Start to specialize roles with a balance and in sync Product, sales, marketing, operations and customer success teams. 

Hire for Culture Fit and EQ

3- Have a strong sense of company values and culture before hiring new employees and making sure there is a high cultural and social fit to the values of your organization. Each new hire will contribute to that culture, think about their emotional intelligence, and not just their skill-set. Making mistakes in the hiring process can impact how well you will be able to scale. 

Automate and Maximize Speed to ROI

4- With cloud technology and tools, you should be thinking how to hack everything that can be automated. Everything that costs your employees time, takes away from how well you will be able to scale. If you missed things you could have automated, your processes might not scale well. Payroll, marketing processes, training, cloud storage, analytics and even IM chat in customer service can be automated. Being able to pay easier, access data faster, streamline opps and market better is obviously important to being able to scale. 

Create the right Marketing Strategy for your Audience

5) Get marketing people who can growth hack your audience. How can a business scale, if nobody knows about it right? Does your niche industry have a strategy that makes more sense for your audience? Is there viral potential or content marketing potential to your market? This will be easier if you are B2C, a bit more difficult if you are B2B. B2B audiences want proof of ROI ahead of social proof, they like knowledge authority, case studies, ahead of catchy social, video and adds. 

Give your Employees Autonomy and Trust  and do not Exploit Them 

6) Create a company culture that thrives on pressure and yet can have a good time doing it. To scale a startup you have to act like a real company. Are you providing the perks that top notch employees expect? Do they get a shares in the company? Are there good benefits? What about parental leave? Are work hours and remote work flexible? Or will attrition, burn-out and disengagement become an issue? How high is your turn-over? How to reduce it to improve company moral?

Reduce Cognitive Load and Maximize Agile Processes 

7) Choose the right group sizes, many Entrepreneurs are proponents of using small, stable teams as the core unit of scale, since this minimizes the challenge of cognitive load and removes unnecessary complexity from tasks. 

“Put in just enough structure and process that you feel like you’re giving up ground grudgingly,”

Keeping teams small and nimble is this often a good idea. 

Do what Works, Growth Hack the Right Channels 

8) Once you have established 'market fit', consider your quickest and biggest ROI channels, the 'low hanging fruit' so to speak and go after them. Use what works, A/B tests and gather data. Follow the facts, what is the most efficient way of acquiring new customers, prospects and qualified leads?

Do Funding and Financial Planning that takes Scaling into Full Account 

9) Make sure you have done the rounds of funding that will meet your scaling needs, make a plan, set targets, set road-maps to get them. 

Ask for Help, Outsource and use Interns 

10) Turn to your advisers often and hire consultants if necessary to facilitate your scaling process. Outsource all non-essential tasks, this might include your QA, your more mundane sales roles, get an intern. A startup has to be lean, focus first on what you are good at, those core competencies of why you hired these guys, and you will start to scale up.