What are the fundamental principles required to scale your startup successfully

I have been fortunate enough to play a key role in the exponential growth of several businesses. These experiences have been some of the most rewarding of my career to date. People often ask me how great Startups can transition from being relatively small, high achieving teams to becoming something so much bigger and impactful.

Below are some fundamental principles that I would encourage any early stage Founder to embrace to help grow and sustain a level of excitement and collective brilliance in your startup as you continue to scale up.

1. Mission - continuing to reinforce your mission is a simple yet critical component which can often be painfully overlooked. You have to make this known to your people consistently. Define and be clear on what needs to be achieved both collectively and individually. Think proactively and creatively about how this can be communicated regularly, with compelling messages that excite your people.

2. Leadership team members have to demonstrate more than just technical competence. Founders and their teams need to give thought to the values and behaviours they want their leaders to demonstrate. These will be the DNA of a startup as it continues to scale and grow. When times get tough or ambiguity is out in full force go back to basics and ask are we still being true to our values.

3. Clearly define roles and responsibilities - everyone needs to have a clear understanding of who is accountable for what and how their work contributes to the mission. Conversely, folks in an early stage startup will often be required to think and operate beyond their core role, especially during times of intensity like due diligence and Deal Room submissions to help woo potential Investors. When it gets noisy, step in to ensure priorities remain clear.

4. Execution - startups can often feel chaotic. Getting work done needs to be as seamless as possible, poor processes and bottlenecks are often the root cause for delays and challenges. Most Startups obsess about their end users and customer experience but it will serve the business well to inject the same level of attention on ‘how stuff gets done’ internally as well. Zoom out. Gather your team and commit to 90 day reviews. List out all of the issues you all are experiencing. Red-circle what you all agree to be the most important issues that need to be resolved and why. Ask everyone, what does Great look like? What do we need to change to get there?

I love partnering with Founders and teams to help them scale. My advice to any early stage Founder is to start giving thought to these principles from day one.

A Scale up Partner can help make these businesses become great places to work, and great workplaces make people and their families happy and more fulfilled.

My final fundamental is honesty. For any Founder, it’s really, really important to be honest with yourself. Failing to see or accept where blindspots might exist, exerting copious amounts of ego or blind optimism will be the surest way of fostering complacency and failure to reach and surpass the true potential of your business.

What do you want people to say about what it's like to work at your startup?

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I’m Andrew Grimshaw , the Founder of MYLO Create .

We partner with early stage Founders, Startups and more established businesses in an advisory capacity to help overcome their scaling challenges and to build an employee experience that retains anddevelops their best people.