The hardest part of business isn’t necessarily developing a product-market fit. After all, much of that process can be self-led. It relies on quantifiable user feedback that you can directly channel into your product iterations.
No, the hardest part of running a business is scaling it beyond the point where company dinners can be arranged around a single table. As a founder, when you’re not responsible for directly hiring everyone, and indeed, you don’t even know everyone in your company, you have to rely on middle management. You have to delegate. And you have to trust that the processes you’ve put in place will ensure the outcomes you desire.
Typically, this point arrives when your team grows beyond 10-15 people, and where most startups get stuck in a rut. Here’s more on why that happens and what to look out for if you’re an aspiring entrepreneur yourself.
Reasons Why Scaling Small Teams Is Hard
1. Hiring Is a Problem
One of the most important parts of starting and scaling your business is making your initial hires. These are the people who will go on to lead teams as your company expands. And you need to be able to trust them, not just to do their tasks satisfactorily, but to supervise others to be just as productive.
Unfortunately, in a number of startups, hiring tends to be reactive, not strategic. The founder tends to hire based on a pain point, such as a process bottleneck or a resignation. As your business grows, this can lead to insufficient clarity on roles, overlapping responsibilities, and inadequate cohesion within your team.
2. The Founder Is a Bottleneck
Oft-repeated, but still very much a problem. The founder, the catalyst for the business, can often be the biggest hurdle to its growth.
Most founders tend to pride themselves on being able to multitask or oversee multiple processes. It’s more or less the job description. But as your team grows into double figures, it can stretch the capabilities of even the most efficient managers. Here are the signs you’re centralizing too much of the decision-making in your company:
- Approvals piling up
- You’re constantly troubleshooting
- Reduced mutual trust within the team
- Missed business targets
- Founder burnout
While delegating executive responsibility is key to avoiding this, you may also want to look at how many menial tasks you’re taking on. Consider hiring an executive assistant early in your startup journey to take the busywork off your plate. If budget is an issue, look at hiring remote business support from a virtual assistant.
3. Communication Issues
With small teams, communication is rarely an issue. Even communication processes are that much easier. A quick Slack message or even a chat in the corridor is enough to get things done.
However, as teams expand, more people need to be looped into the decision-making process. Communication tends to become more prolonged and complex and require multiple platforms. Furthermore, processes built on informal chats also tend to lack documentation. This affects onboarding, team alignment, and execution as your business scales.
A good way to circumvent this is to establish lightweight, scalable communication channels that easily incorporate new team members and can record processes that you’ve followed in the past.
4. Culture Break
Much like communication, culture builds effortlessly early on in a startup’s life. However, in the absence of clear processes, whether that’s intentional hiring or company values, much of this will be down to your employees and their personalities.
Your initial hires will figure out the interpersonal dynamics amongst themselves and ‘create’ a culture they’re comfortable with. As new hires are onboarded, they will either assimilate into this ad-hoc culture or clash with it.
As part of your business’s setup, highlight a clear set of values and ethos you want your startup to adhere to. Then introduce those values into all your processes, including hiring, collaboration, evaluation, promotion, and so on.
5. Business Delivery Is Affected
This can often be the death-knell for a startup. The fact is that compromised processes and decision-making will eventually affect the quality of your output. This could be either product defects or service inadequacies, but rest assured, your customers will let you know.
Your support reps, or yourself as the founder, will see complaints pile up and customers abandoning you for other suppliers. This, in turn, affects your bottom line and your ability to pay for continued business delivery via staff salaries or new manufacturing orders. Your job as a startup founder is to nip any growing pains in the bud before they reach this stage.
The key to a robust business that scales efficiently is more prep time at the outset. While you’re creating your MVP, put some thought into what you want your company to look like 10-20 years down the line. Then work backwards and build in the processes that will enable you to achieve that goal.
