The Long Game: The Tasks With Scaling Up A Startup

The great things in life are about freedom. Emotional freedom. Financial freedom. Physical freedom. In business, we all started our own companies for a reason linked to one of those three, or even all three! The difficult phase in your startup has now been overcome, after all the stress and headaches it has taken you to get this far, you have finally hit the stage where you have achieved a decent paycheck, and the business is starting to make waves in the right channels. And now, as your startup hits the scale up stage, there is a fundamental difference in the attitude and spirit you need to exude. The hard grit and fight to get you to this point has served you well, but it’s now time to take it to the next level. How do you start to implement a scale up successfully?

Starting With More Definition

If you were working by yourself at the beginning, but now have a team behind you, it is very likely that the roles have all been generalized, and you have all been jack-of-all-trades to get the business off the ground. The task in scaling up requires people to relinquish responsibilities, which is something that people don’t, as a rule, necessarily like to do. It may even cause a ruckus in the business, but if you don’t start to spread out the original role of “IT specialist” into sub-divisions, such as SEO, social media, and content specialist, the efficient scaling up cannot be implemented properly. As you scale up, you need to think about relocation, which can be a complex situation. However, due to the amount of startups that find themselves in this situation, there are many rental offices available. You can search for an office space online that caters to your needs and has the functionality for what your business needs. Re-arranging the roles can cause a mutiny, but this is an essential part of the process. The nature of startups require creativity and risk, and as a company develops into more functional roles it can take some of the edge out of it for workers, but that doesn’t mean people cannot take on ambitious projects. It just means that the core functions of the business are a priority.

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Hire Good Managers For The Good Of The Team

Yes, it sounds obvious, but the process of hiring people that can deal with the personal side of upscaling is a fine art. Leaders, line managers, bosses, whatever you want to call them, are people that deal with the nitty-gritty. Such as the processes, systems, reports and above all, have to be able to motivate their team, so while the other people are doing the enjoyable stuff, the managers are taking a bullet and making sure the business is running smoothly. And not only are they there to deal with the necessary stuff, they are there to coach the team, to inspire, and to know when people need downtime.  

Schooling Your New Employees

The peril of a startup company is the “let’s all muck in” mentality, and while it has got you this far, once you have new employees onboard, you need to spend a couple of days integrating people into the fine details of your company. Everyone onboard needs to know why your business is going to win the war, and what it takes to get the company ethos out there. It’s amazing the amount of people that are in a startup and have no clue about the whole idea behind the company brand, or image, and this will make for miscommunication further down the line, so you are better off spending a couple of days at the start making sure that everyone knows their role.

Look After Your Staff, And They’ll Look After You

Your business depends on the welfare of your staff. Once you have left the “startup company” tag behind, you need to start putting systems in place that ensure the wellbeing of your employees. Things like a pension plan/401(k), paternity and maternity leave, and bonus schemes. Starting these will keep employee morale high and will incline those staff members to stick with you. The quality of the staff will increase due to the packages you offer, and you can start to hire that Oxford graduate or someone with 20 years’ experience in the field. By looking after your staff, they will work to ensure your company increases in stature as time goes on. The transition from a startup company to a fully functioning business is tricky but essential to secure the future of your organization.

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