The 5 Stages of Growth of a Startup

Similar to a kid, an organisation evolves in nature as it grows in size. And as a founder you will experience similar frustration to being a parent, and hopefully similar pride too as you see your company grow. Your startup is your baby. You want the best for it, you want it to succeed and you want employees to be happy. But that's also a lot of responsibility: these people depend and rely on you. As the organisation grows, you'll realise that you lose control little by little until it becomes almost impossible to make things happen just by asking.?

Hyper-growth is similar to adolescence. There’s a unique feeling of ambiguity, chaos and stress that comes with doubling or tripling your team every six months. And when you become the parent of a young adult, there is actually not much you can tell them to do, just because you said so. You may advise and suggest and hope that the values and knowledge you gave them when they were young will help them make the right decisions.

Ultimately, any influence you may have will depend on the level of trust you earned over time from the actions you took and the discussions you had with them since they were little.

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If you’re a parent, you’ll see what I mean. But even if you’re not, you were once a child! What is important here is putting yourself in the shoes of your employees to better understand the organisation’s perspective.

As a kid, you would have seen that relationship with your parents evolve. As a young child, you looked up to your parents: they were the best, they knew everything, you trusted them to do the best for you and you listened. It started to change when you became a teenager. You realised your parents were making mistakes too, you did not quite agree with them anymore and you became reluctant to do as you were told unquestioningly. That’s the reality of a startup.

Not only is your organisation made of adults whom you can't treat like children (because that is no fun for anyone and certainly does not scale!), but your organisation itself will become rapidly too big for you to have real control over how things are executed on the ground. You will have to rely on people to know, understand and figure out.

There are five typical phases between zero and 1,000 employees, the eye of the storm of scaling actually happening roughly between 50 and 500.

This being said, like people, every startup is different. A company’s unique identity depends on locations, industries but most importantly on its leader’s personality, style and maturity. Some startups will look and feel scrappy at 500 employees while others may feel quite rigid from the start. Some startups may experience politics and toxicity at an early stage while others may start feeling it at 1,000 employees.

So FIRST, embrace who you are as a founder, as this will define what your startup looks like no matter what. THEN, make sure you build the foundations right from the start because once you reach pre-adolescence, it will be too late.

Find out more about the challenges associated with each stage of growth, and where you focus should be as your company grows the book?From Zero to 1,000: The Organisational Playbook For Startups. ??

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About the author:

Anne Caron is an international speaker, author and People Strategy expert. Drawing on her 10 years' experience as a senior HR executive at Google, she set up her consulting practice in 2015 to support leaders in building high performing and positive organisations. Through her experience working with entrepreneurs, she developed a practical methodology for startups to grow the right organisation and teams, which she describes in her book?From Zero to 1,000: The Organisational Playbook For Startups.

Find out more about Anne Caron:?www.annecaronconsulting.com