Learn how to build a team through scaling to weather the stormy sea of the business world

Scaling is a difficult process for many startups with the multiple inefficiencies present. Many companies struggle to scale because of a lack of knowledge on how to do so effectively or because of certain bottlenecks that end up becoming fatal in the long run.

At the Start

When you’re building up your startup, your most important decisions are your co-founders (if any) and your team.

There really isn’t a magic number of co-founders or team members that will make a startup succeed. Only you will know whether you need a co-founder or not. Business is often brutal, tough, and lonely — far from the rosy picture painted by mainstream media. It involves huge sacrifices from each individual, both professional and personal.

Instead, what matters most is to choose people that have skill-sets that compliment yours and, more importantly, those who share a common vision.

Does the team share your vision of getting an exit 5-10 years down the row or do they see the business as a lifestyle business instead? It’s important to be aligned.

For Steve Melhuish, having his co-founder Jani Rautiainen was essential when starting PropertyGuru Group. They were polar opposites who had the same idea at the same time, with complementary skill sets, and who shared a common vision. They were so different that they scored on the Myer Briggs Personality Test as 8 Quadrant Opposites!

Delegation

Some founders might be hesitant to hand over control. That’s completely understandable given the time and effort they’ve spent putting the business together. There’s also the fear of compromising out of necessity.

But scaling the business means an exponential increase in complexity, especially when going regional and hiring. Proceeding without a regional and senior leadership team without support, structure, or training in place is a one-way ticket to making one big expensive and slow mistake.

For a small startup, it’s natural for everything to go through a single decision maker. However, as the business scales, this becomes less and less scalable. This is due to the lengthy decision time and an unhealthy amount of stress placed on the main decision maker. This becomes vital as your company starts to scale and you begin to face increasingly nuanced and complicated problems.

As the team grows, it’s also important to start empowering other members to make decisions. This is necessary in order to increase the agileness of the organization and to develop your team members into leaders. Eventually, these team members will lead teams of their own and its important to help provide them with the space to take the steps to learn how to do so.

Talent

Good talent has always come at a price. In the early years, sell the dream with the upside of bonuses or stock option. Even during later years, with intense competition abound, this will be a perennial struggle as you scale your business.

When a company is small, company culture is easy to develop. But once the company scales and grows, this is when leaders need to step up to actively develop company culture.

Here are some good general guidelines.

Firstly, implement and communicate your core-values to all staff. This ensures everyone is clear on what principles to guide all interactions both internally and externally. It also helps keep everyone aligned.

Secondly, have a small number of rules and stick to them. Don’t overcomplicate procedures and empower employees to make whatever small difference they can.

Thirdly, Hire, develop and fire based on attitude and values. Invest in people and their ability to grow and develop. You want commandos who’ll storm the building for you, not conscripts who are there against their will.

Lastly, give back. This sounds counterintuitive but it helps foster a sense of belonging among the company. Companies like PropertyGuru Group treat this seriously because they strongly believe in the need to treat everyone with respect.

AMA!

These are just some of the insights we’ll be going through during this week’s AMA with Steve Melhuish. He’s got a lot to share on this topic with his experience scaling PropertyGuru Group to over 4 different countries.

If you’ve got any further questions, tune in to our AMA on our e27 Facebook page this month on the 26th at 4pm with Steve! Leave your questions in the comment section below or in the RSVP form using the link provided 🙂

See you there!

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