The cracks of scale

In my recent blog You’re holding your (drum) sticks backwards, I described startups as a garage band and scaleups as a jazz band. The shift is the introduction of necessary processes and principles. It’s less of a free-for-all and more about developing useful guidelines, practices and philosophies to enable your business to scale.?

It’s like moving from overwhelm to organised. Cracks are starting to form, and they must be addressed before they consume your business.

In her article Give away your legos and other commandments for scaling startups , Molly Graham (ex-early Google & Facebook) discusses the challenges of scaling.?

“At 50 people, everything that used to come naturally is now a struggle. And as a new leader, you start getting difficult questions that you’ve never had to answer before. I had a CEO tell me that someone asked them about their career path at the company, and they were like ‘I don’t know! Why are you asking that? We have so much to do!’”

Start with you!

It’s time to get really clear about who does what. Start with you! Define your boundaries and communicate them. People like to know what’s expected of them.

Scale your team

To scale your business, you will also need to scale your team. Old ways of working where you hired your mates - people just like you - aren’t going to enable your business to grow. Take the opportunity to hire the right people with the right skills to fill the gaps. Bring in strengths you didn’t realise you needed. Consider the team to you need to support your future strategy, not just your current operations.?

Change your communication

As a smaller business, you have everyone in the room for every conversation and every decision. As you scale, not only is this inefficient and ineffective, but it’s also unsustainable, impractical, and expensive!?

Decide who really needs to hear the message and have input. You can’t continue to involve everyone in every conversation. It’s time to make some tough calls. It won’t be easy, but it must be done.

Build your network

As you scale, consider who you know in the community. Who are the investors, board members, customers, key talent, networks, eco-system supports, technical groups, panel members – people you can leverage to help you succeed??

There is no expectation for you to know how to do everything. Anyone who tries to scale without a support network, will fail.

Where are some of the cracks of scale in your business? What impact are they having?

To avoid the cracks becoming a chasm, prioritise the changes that need to happen, and action them. I call this your Legend List!?

If you’d like to learn more about how I can help you do that, send me a message or get in touch via email. I'd love to chat.

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Mary Butler is a People Strategy Expert, Author, Coach and Facilitator. She gets what traditional HR doesn’t.

Mary has 25+ years of talent management experience, from global corporates to scaleups in every sector, across Europe, the US, Asia and Australia in industries from aviation to tech and FMCG. That’s deep expertise, across a broad range of leadership topics, that we can leverage in your business.

While she has a BSc and an MBA, it’s Mary’s ability to identify and address those often buried challenges that makes her different. She has an ability to cut through to noise to help you make the tough calls. And she doesn’t offer an off-the-shelf solution because you don’t have off-the-shelf challenges.

If you’d like to learn more, here are four ways you can explore how Mary can help:

Download Mary’s whitepaper ?Founder as Leader. Are you ready to lead?

Read Mary’s Musings on her blog.

Pre-order her new book, Legendary Scaleup Leadership, or buy one of her previous books.

Make a time to chat about how Mary supports founders and scaleups like yours.