When you start a company there is really no guide, handbook on how to scale your team.
All companies are different, all companies need to scale differently- but most importantly with
startups, things move so fast that your scale strategy needs to be that flexible.
So I want to share some of the lessons we’ve learned
growing Slidebean from 3 founders to 36 full-time employees.
Let’s start with Co-founders I’ve talked about this before,
and I’ve also covered how to find co-founders, so I won’t focus on that again.
I will just mention this premise that you and your
co-founders have the ability to build and scale your company without needing any external skills
In other words, the skills needed to get your company from zero to say,
$100,000 in revenue- should be covered by your co-founding team.
For a mobile app, that’s front-end, back-end, UX, growth, as a marketing
and operations. For a B2B SaaS, that’s also front-end, back-end, UX, operations,
but probably sales and business development, more than marketing.
If these skills are critical to building your company, they should not be hires, they should be
co-founders- because you will not be able to recruit top talent at the earliest stage, with no
salary budget. If you want a game-changing team, for a little money, the only way to bring is as co-founders.
Also, the fewer the better. You want people who cover more than one of those skills,
so that you can cover all the skillset with the smallest
team possible - rather than ending up with 5 co-founders (and 5 mouths to feed).
When you have little money for salaries.
The next category for me is scaling Team from 3 to 10
Looking back, our first 7 hires were absolutely critical. That team defined our company culture,
with echoes that we can feel even today, even if some of them are no longer with the company.
To me those hires need to be proactive, fast-learning people that are not necessarily
specialized in anything. They need to be able to wear many hats, have the capacity and the
willingness to do a task that is completely different from what they were hired to do.
The kind of work relationship you form with them will define your company
in more ways than you can imagine. Trust me.
One approach that worked for us was using a Myers-Briggs test as part of
the application process. This would allow us to understand their personality type,
and determine if they were going to get along with the rest of the team.
We especially check compatibility with their teammates and direct superior.
During this time we hired 1 developer, 2 customer success/support people, 2 marketing people,
1 office manager, and one Head of Sales, who eventually became our Chief Revenue Officer.
Pretty much all of those roles joined the company ready to hear plenty of hats.
By the way, one big mistake we made as the team grew, was assuming that these
earlier employees wanted, or were qualified to own their own teams as the company scaled.
Seniority in the company does not equal management skills. You might have a most senior developer
that just wishes to code, without the trouble of running a team, and that’s perfectly fine. Don’t
assume that promotion to a manager is what they want or need, or what’s best for your business.
The next ramp-up is scaling to 25 people- but before I go to that I
want to talk about our sponsor for today’s video, ChartMogul.
We use ChartMogul to track our SaaS Metrics: our MRR, Churn Rate, LTV- cohort tables depending on
where the customer came from, and even revenue from our non-recurring side of the business.
They are offering up to $600 in credits if you sign up at Chartmogul.com/slidebean- and
if your company still hasn’t reached $10K MRR, you can use it for free.
OK- so getting back to scaling the team.
Team 11-25
As your team grows to 25 people the dynamic of the company will start to change pretty
dramatically, as well as how team members interact with each other.
When you are a tiny team, especially a tiny startup, you can get away with a
lot of things that seem ‘normal in the context of that company: for example,
many team members brought and used their own laptops for work, and it was fine.
As you grow, you’ll see the structure of your team how formal you need to be about these things,
that changed drastically which was a surprising thing for us,
especially having operated for a couple of years in this intimate, friend-like organization.
But more than that, the biggest surprise was
how at this stage doubling the team does not mean doubling your productivity.
During this ramp-up, we scaled from 2 engineers to 6,
and from 2 marketing team members to 5- but the productivity from those teams did not increase
proportionally to the number of people. At this stage, you have to account for management,
a delegation of tasks, coordination, and communication between teams, and that takes time.
At this stage, hiring gets easier because you are now hiring people
with specific skillsets, for specific roles. For us, that was a Webflow developer,
a digital animator with experience with motion graphics, or someone to run Google Ads.
These are specific people with specific roles, which also means those people will
probably not be getting involved with everything else the company is doing.
When you are 10 people you essentially have everybody doing everything,
and therefore, everyone is mostly in-sync.
When you have 20 people, you start to have people who have their head buried on a
specific task and are working to be absolutely killer at that one task,
but again, they will probably not care too much about the specifics of a different team.
At this point, you begin to define a hierarchy for people.
We’ve gone over many iterations, but I'm going to give you the one we use now, which I think is the better curated one.
By this time we already had some mid-level managers and one senior manager,
who had become our Chief Revenue Officer- but the structure we created had its
flaws, and we had to solve it for our next stage.
Team 25-50
Again, we are halfway here, at 36 full-time employees on Slidebean.
Since our scale was fast and the tasks within the company changed very drastically over the years,
there’s a good chance you’ll end up with an org chart that does not make a lot of sense.
And it needs to make sense. At this point in the organization,
you need to worry about a lot of things that weren’t relevant before.
For example, you need to be able to standardize salaries so that team members in
comparable roles, with comparable experience, earn comparable salaries.
You will probably be able to afford more experienced team members,
that aren’t necessarily managers. We had a couple of cases where this new hire would have
a salary expectation higher than the person they’d be reporting to- which
mean he had to adjust both salaries in order for the compensation to be fair between the manager and new hire
We also had to deal with teams that no longer made sense (because the structure of the company
changed) so teams had to be broken up and rebuilt with a new manager or users of tasks.
A lot of what we’ve done over the past couple of years when we have been
in this category- has been clean up not firing people(!), but defining their roles much better.
Our current structure looks like this:
Employees are team members dedicated to one or two specific tasks.
Leads are team members who have a higher authority or seniority than the rest of
their peers. We acknowledge that authority with a title and a bump in their salary.
Many leads aren’t ready or just don’t want to actually
manage people- so their focus is just being great at the tasks they own and being the spearhead for that team.
We now have various Project Managers in the organization, which don’t have direct reports,
but they are the right-hand person to their manager, helping coordinate
and delegate tasks with their team while taking some tasks of their own.
Managers, well Manage teams. Some teams are small- as little as 2-3 people;
but a manager is defined by,
Their capacity to own and track a KPI that is key to the organization.
Their capacity to delegate tasks and see them through.
Their capacity to manage a team- which is easier said than done.
There’s a human side to having someone report to you: understanding what motivates them,
knowing and caring about what is going on in their lives, how to retain them,
how much to pay them! - and at the same time, letting them go.
It’s not for the faint of heart and again, it’s not for everyone.
Next up, Directors We have two directors at the moment: our Head
of Product, and our Agency Director- who leads our consulting branch (which has over 10 employees).
Directors completely own specific branches of the team
and have one or more managers reporting directly to them.
I think that the defining characteristic here is their capacity to own large teams,
their deep understanding of all the tasks that their teams do, and their
ability to make metrics-driven decisions (that of course have a massive impact on the company).
Our two Directors also have a big influence in the direction the company takes:
they have the visibility to have an input in many of our decisions,
and if they are there, it means that the founders respect their opinion strongly.
it can of course sways from one side to another
Above directors all we have is Officers, but at this point all our Officers are co-founders.
This is by no means set in stone, this is just what just hed works for us and what we'd learn to adapt taking from a bunch of different sources.
Hope this was useful as you scale your teams. Let me know
in the comments, if you want me to dive deeper into either of these and don't forget to subscribe. See you next week!