How to Scale Your Business Like a Rockstar!

If you are looking to scale your business fast, with the right people, systems and operations that will ensure the right culture, organisational design, processes, and structure, this article is for you.

Cash is one of the many challenges of scaling up a business, but it is not the only one. There are many others that are equally important for you to consider:

1. Losing team intimacy, worrying about possible chaotic operations and unpredictable performances where there is no structure, or adding too much structure, complexity and layers. At the early stages of a company, the owner / Founder does everything and directly supervises teams that don't make major decisions. Communication among employees is frequent and informal. Long hours of work are rewarded by the promise of ownership but with modest salaries. Management acts as the customer reacts. The owner is still synonymous with the business and performs most tasks. As the company grows and more people are onboarded this model is however no longer sustainable. Solution: a) Hire functional experts and boost up the People function with leaders that can help you professionalise services and hire quality and diverse talent with the right experience and culture fit and an eye to the company's future rather than its current state. b) Hire a Chief of Staff and a Strategy expert to help you solve complex challenges, achieve gains and productivity, create some structure, efficiency and focus in your work. c) Introduce systems that will allow you to automate processes to free up some time and remove you from some unnecessary tasks and layers of work. d) Build financial and forecasting capabilities that will give you a systematic view of your financial and people position so that you have a good succession and financial plan in place that is suitable for your expansion plans and will ensure that people knowledge does not disappear as employees and leaders leave the company. e) Create a structure without excess layers that will slow things down and restrict the information flow and possibly demotivate employees believing that they are not to be trusted to handle their own work. The management structure will help you accommodate the increased headcount and free up some time to plan ahead.? f) Introduce some form of formal communication. Provide clear management guidance and put processes in place so that everyone knows who the decision-makers are at each stage.
2. Teams’ roles and responsibilities shift "Old guard vs new guard": Early employees may see external functional recruits taking over their responsibilities, and may decide to leave, taking away valuable insights and understanding of the firm's mission, culture and values. At the early stages of a company's growth, early employees are the jack of all trades, they do lots of roles at once without having formal experience or full understanding of the role. As the company grows this is difficult to sustain as employees lack the knowledge and experience to handle everything on their own and this leads to employees being burnout. Solution: Cultivate a growth mindset. Remind existing employees of the challenges ahead and how experienced talent and functional teams could help.
3. Losing speed and control: The question is: Is the Founder/Owner willing to see mistakes being made? Does she/he have the strategic ability to look beyond the present? Can she/he truly and effectively delegate responsibility to others? This is a pivotal period in a company's life where the Founder/Owner needs to rise to the challenge or else step down. During the scale-up phase, centralised authority becomes a bottleneck that hinders information flow, decision making and execution.?A couple of people on the top can't effectively supervise everyone increasingly specialised day to day work. It is often the case where we find organizations that are slow-moving keep decision making at high layers, whereas in faster-moving organizations, decision making is a couple of layers lower. I agree that some critical decisions are to be made only by the CEO/Founder/Owner but more often than not the decision-making quality is at least equally good if made at lower levels. Solution: Push down decision making to your frontline team, you need to feel comfortable that they might sometimes make the wrong decisions or deliver a less optimal solution, but you get the speed instead of perfection. You will also gain by getting multiple experiments happening at the same time as you get multiple trials and errors to reach the most optimal decision. Besides you'd rather have a decision that gets executed at lightning speed, and that you may find out a few weeks later that it didn't work at all and need alterations than wait for three months or more on the same decision and then decide not to do anything at all.
4. Losing creativity: As functional teams can create silos that reduce creativity and collaboration, find ways to bridge those silos. Solution: Create a culture of experimentation where mistakes are accepted and considered part of the learning process. Ran cross-functional projects and brainstorming sessions to spark creativity in teams and a culture of continuous feedback loop so that everyone can learn from each other and together they can move the company forward faster. Always remember that some of the best ideas come from everywhere in particular those close to the customer. Also, when you reach a relevant size that your company is operating in multiple markets that are extremely different, consider pushing the decision making, from the regional headquarters down into the country organizations.
5. ?Maintaining or losing cultural identity as more people come on board. Culture helps employees work across boundaries and engage in spontaneous collaborations to exchange ideas to innovate. So how to keep it alive? Solution: Reinforce Culture in vision and mission statements, make it visual in the building, in all sorts of communication, in recruitment and in performance evaluation.?Reward the desired behaviours.?Reinforce it also through weekly town halls where employees feel insiders and privy to the leaders thinking about critical issues.
6. Product and Service fit as you scale: Reevaluate product/service fit and cut losses fast. Measure the success of each product and service and remember that early-stage start-ups measure registrations or subscribers, but when they reach the scale-up phase it is also important to look a layer deeper such as how many of your customers are happy with the product/service and how many are likely to reorder or refer your business to another customer.

Final thoughts: Once you figure out the formula to win, move fast before your competitors catch up with you. Venture building is a never-ending experiment, if you have that mindset to constantly experiment, learn and adapt, you will be successful in the long run.

These are some of my thoughts as to how best to scale a company like a Rockstar, do you have any others to share? I am always happy to hear your views on this topic and help you succeed in your next stage of growth. Is scaling your business something you are considering? If so, feel free to reach out.

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