Recruiting the Right People to Ensure Business Success

One of the things I get asked all the time is, "How do you define the stage when a business goes from startup to scale-up?" And it's not a simple answer, there are a few characteristics around it, but one of the key things that I know is incredibly important and I would go as far as to say it's crucial, is the ability to bring process and to bring structure into your organisation, into your company. And if you think about it for a second, what that really means is that if you're a startup, you can get away a bit with chaos. There is a creative spark, which kind of comes into the business where you see a problem and then you effectively create a solution for it and there's a lot of energy that goes into that stage of the business, it's fantastic fun. But there is also less complexity.

There are usually less people around the place, there's normally one clear ambition and goal and as you start to kind of test that and experiment and start to get traction, you start to kind of think, "wow, this is easy, right?" Not necessarily, always easy, because I say that entrepreneurship is a roller coaster, but you know, the energy carries you through. When you start to get that traction, when you start to get those first signs of success, what you find out very, very quickly is that you can become the bottleneck in the business. You, the founder, the person running it can get pulled from pillar to post having to try and do everything, and it's at that point that you realise it's important to do two things.

You've got to build a team around you, but you've effectively got to start to build some processes and processes are not necessarily to be thought of as these boring things, this kind of schematics with lots of different steps to them, that is part of what you need to do to build them, but the way I think of process is freedom. The more that I can set processes up in my businesses, the more freedom I can have from doing all of the tasks that need to be done, I can delegate those tasks to other people, delegate them to people who may be better at them than me, and importantly, I can also align resources effectively and sometimes those resources are scarce.

If you've only got a limited amount of marketing budget for example, and you need to acquire the right types of customers, you need to be absolutely clear on a process that's going to work for you. 

So, importantly, the starting point is always understanding what you're trying to achieve, it's about understanding the goals that you have, it's about mapping out a plan to achieve those goals in a very kind of considered and precise way, getting to steps, looking at the measurement of how those steps are going to perform, testing, iterating, monitoring everything and then evolving and changing your processes so that ultimately they can become refined and really, really powerful over time.

It's quite uncommon to get them right the first time, just to be super clear because that testing phase is important, but once you start to get them working for you and everything starts to run like a well-oiled machine, your business can really skyrocket from there. 

The other part that I get asked a lot is how many processes does the business really need? And the answer to that question depends, again, it's not a simple one because some businesses have very simple models, some have more complexity. But in the businesses that I work with, I look at three main areas, I look at how you acquire customers, how you deliver your product, your service, the solution to those customers, and how you address both income and expenses. So, how you're looking at your cash flow. Now, there are many, many more processes that you can have, and they are micro-processes, but I don't want to get into the complexity in today’s blog. The important thing is that you understand the steps that are going to achieve your goals, you measure everything that you possibly can. And if you do that well, and you do that with intention, as you're going through that start-up to scale-up phase, you're going to create so much more time for yourself. And that time can be used to be spent on the business strategically, which is going to drive further growth in the future.