3 Challenges For Startup In The Scaling Up Phase

Author: Jack Le5 yearsago 0 Comments 1.9k Views

At the beginning of a company’s phase, each member will need to take part in multiple sectors of the business in order to help the business to grow. However, when the company grows to a certain stage – around 200 employees – the company culture that has been working at the beginning will start to falter under new demand. Therefore, you can have a look at here to see how experts take care of their businesses when they have this kind of issue.

You need to cut off things if you want to grow your business

Ethan Mollick – an associate professor of management, said that one of the most common mistakes that growing companies often make is “not subtracting when you add”.

At a specific time of your company phase, you have to cut off things that are no longer applicable for your company although it has been really helpful at the beginning. One example is at the time a company reaches 500 employees, meetings like all-hands meetings (all-staff meetings) might not be helpful and practical. “The things that made you successful early on aren’t always useful later’’, he concluded.

How to find the right fit to hire

Growing your team is not only about just finding people with the right skills but also about finding candidates with the personality and ability to handle unavoidable situations in the company.

Narie Foster, CEO of the work-clothing brand M.M.LaFleur, and Kimberley Ho, CEO, and co-founder of the skin-care startup Everdeen, are all fascinated by knowing how their candidates describe their previous bosses and what feedback they would give them. This way helps them to examine her candidates’ honesty and real perception.

For Foster, she is also interested in hearing other people describe the hardest time of their working experience. “How you talk about hard times really shows both self-awareness and where you fall on the optimistic and positivity spectrum, which often is very important getting through these kinds of jobs”, she explained. She identified that the way candidates talk about the previous environments that they both enjoy or did not enjoy will help her to know what kinds of working cultures are suitable for them.

Another expert – Marie Berry, the CEO, and co-founder of the automated marketing platform Kara, also agreed with this idea. “The way they describe [themselves] often gives me a good insight into how the person ticks”, she added.

Finding qualified talent to join your team is a daunting challenge in and of itself, but taking the time to prioritize your startup’s company culture is likely to help your business in the long run.

Prevent “role confusion” before it starts

Lorna Hagen, former chief people officer at Namely – a human-resources-software company, said that when startups begin to scale into mid-sized tech companies or grow to the range of 200 to 500 employees, the role confusion might arise and drive many employees to quit.

This reason happens not only because jobs can be misrepresented during the interview process, but it also happens because roles often change over time as the company grows. Hagen said, “everybody has linked arms and is doing everything together, and they have absolute transparency into all the information.”

As companies become bigger, transparency changes, and it depends on how managers and employees alike to create greater role clarity during the scaling process. The responsibility is extremely high for each individual where he/she will need to be extremely dedicated to what they are looking for, Hagen concluded.

According to Business Insider

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