The views expressed by the business participants are their own.
All startups dream of quick and sustainable success. However, achieving significant capital growth remains a challenge for many entrepreneurs. You must always be willing to adapt, test and refine processes.
Recently, our organization, now recognized as one of Inc.’s fastest growing companies. in 2024, it celebrated another milestone: in less than six months, we built a highly efficient team of more than 20 talented people from the original team of only three. people.
1. Finding i on the right advisors of problem right now
In 2023, we put a lot of emphasis on expanding our network of advisors and partners who have already experienced that and have successfully transitioned to where we wanted to be. It was a valuable time and money investment.
As business owners, it can be easy to seek advice from peers in your industry, and sometimes, that advice can be good, but getting advice from someone who is further along in their business journey is just as important. A simple 20-minute conversation with a counselor can give you the breakthrough you need to solve a problem you’ve been struggling with for months or years.
Finding the best advisors for your specific issue, not just your type of business, is important. We have a PR and production agency, and we never got advice from other agency owners, but we got a lot of advice from other business owners who had a lot of experience in areas of need. For example, we had a tough time on our sales side, so we used Cole Gordon for training, which helped us get our sales systems up and running.
Related: How Professional Consulting Fuels Startup Success
2. Putting yourself on the scale
Whether the goal is to scale or not, in order to grow, you’ll need to plan your product/service offering and how you do it behind the scenes. We were once an agency that only offered custom/tailored offerings to clients and managed the accounts accordingly.
This created difficulties in getting new clients and finding staff to manage our accounts, preventing our founder and I from stepping back from the day-to-day tasks of fulfilling clients. During this phase, and even now, we always ask, “Is this solution scalable?” and “Does this solution solve a current, or future problem?”
Asking these questions has saved us from spending hours and money making unnecessary changes.
Related: 7 Key Ways to Scale Your Startup or Business
3. When do you hire new employees
When our sales side started to grow a lot, we were facing another problem. Finding talent. We found that new hires took, on average, 90 days to get involved in our company and work independently, whether they came with experience or not. We have faced client rejection to ensure we can succeed with our current client list.
After talking with our network contact, Jeff Sekinger, we found out that many other businesses are facing the same difficulties. Jeff solved this problem by investing in and building talent early. Following his lead, we hired a new employee every week, which changed everything for us.
Hiring a new person every other week was an expensive investment at first, but it gave our team time to ramp up and allowed us to triple the number of new customers we could onboard each month. As the team grew rapidly, we promoted our existing members to management roles, which was a big change for our team. Delegating the day-to-day operations, including account success and onboarding and training new hires, freed up our Founder and I to step back and invest our time in other areas of the business that needed our attention.
4. Understanding the true bandwidth capabilities of your team
Over the past six months, we’ve struggled to understand how much time our team can put into an entire work day. It is based primarily on the capacity of each assumed bandwidth member rather than on the actual data. By using time tracking software, we can see the true capabilities of our team. It highlighted which clients were taking the most time relative to their savings and identified specific tasks that were taking the longest to complete.
We have increased some of our customer retention based on the amount of service they required from us. This upgrade allowed our team to manage additional accounts without disrupting their weekly work. Additionally, we simplified many processes and tasks to improve efficiency, enabling the team to focus more on implementing KPIs instead of tedious control tasks that weren’t really needed at the end of the day.
Related: Increase Employee Success With These 3 Proven Strategies
Over time, the data showed us a true client-to-account ratio, which has been invaluable to us in ensuring that we can continue to grow as quickly as we want.
I would like to believe that our agency’s journey is truly unique in the industry. Instead of just filling roles and focusing only on income, we pay more attention to the culture that has been going on for a long time. Our goal was to maximize and appreciate the strengths and contributions of all team members.
As we aim for continued growth and continued success, these practices will remain in place – as they say, “Take care of your people, and your people will take care of your business.”
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