How to ease growing pains when scaling up your business

Growing pains, we’ve all had them right?

They’re uncomfortable at the best of times; even more so when you’re talking about scaling up your business.

But before we dig into the painful side of scaling up — well done! Getting to this point is an amazing achievement and it is something that should be celebrated.

However, scaling a business is no easy feat. From hiring more people to continuously increasing overhead costs, accelerated company growth can lead to a number of growing pains.

Here’s a few steps to make everything a little bit easier…

1. Keep a clear focus on culture

Ensuring your systems and processes are ready to scale is one thing, but without a clear focus on culture you will never succeed.

At the end of the day, the more people who join the team at the same time, the higher the dilution of the company culture. However with the right focus, it’s possible to not only maintain culture but ensure it gets stronger with each new member of the team.

Before you scale, make a list of the qualities you want your company, and people, to embody… who do you want to be? How do you want your employees to feel? What are you doing in the world? What’s your vision for the change you want to make? What is your purpose?

Communicate these things again and again and again. All the time. Even once you’ve scaled, never stop sharing them with your people.

2. Hire (and fire) the right people

Scale ups in their nature are fast-paced. You have to make endless decisions and they all had to be made yesterday.

Because of this things can slip through the net, but there is one thing you shouldn’t rush: talent acquisition.

Make sure to focus on hiring quality people rather than settling for the sake of saving time. Don’t lower your bar because you need to grow faster; otherwise it will come back to bite you on the arse further down the line.

And as hard as it might be, on top of hiring people, you may need to fire some too. Toby Hough, who led People & Culture for Europe for Medallia during their key scale up years advises, “be honest with people and move quickly if the organisation is no longer at a size and scale where they will thrive.”

Your scale up will never succeed unless you have the right people for the job.

3. ‘Give away your Legos’

It’s clear that Molly Graham knows a thing or two about scaling businesses. From Facebook to Google, she has successfully led rapid growth in a number of scale ups. Graham’s advice to ease the growing pains of scaling up is to ‘give away your Legos’. The blocks of Lego representing the different pieces of your job.

In the early stages, as you start to scale, everyone has so many Legos to choose from — you’re doing 10 jobs and building your own tower. As momentum builds, others are building around you and usually the instinct is to grab onto all your Legos — all the tasks and responsibilities that you managed before you scaled.

However Graham says you need to learn to share the work as more people join your team. If you want sustainable growth, you need to give away your Legos. “It means trusting other people with something you care about,” Graham says.

And trust goes a long way beyond those Lego blocks. It empowers your team to build their own towers and make their own decisions; creating the structure your business needs to succeed whilst scaling.

Right now isn’t forever

The important thing to remember about growth spurts is that they come to an end. Yes, it might feel uncomfortable — maybe even painful — right now, but it will get easier.

Preparing for change before it happens is key to managing it. Keep the above in mind and those growing pains won’t be so bad!