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Every startup dreams of rapid and sustainable success. But achieving significant revenue growth remains a challenge for many entrepreneurs, and requires a willingness to constantly adapt, experiment, and refine your processes.
Recently recognized as one of Inc.’s Fastest Growing Companies of 2024, we’ve achieved a new milestone: going from a startup team of just three to building a high-performing team of 20+ talented people in just six months.
1. Find it right Mentor problem Right now
In 2023, we focused on expanding our network of mentors and partners who had already been through what we were going through then and had successfully pushed us to where we were headed, which was an invaluable investment of time and money.
As a business owner, it’s easy to ask for advice from peers in your industry, and sometimes that advice can be helpful, but getting advice from someone who’s further ahead of you in business can be even more valuable. A quick 20-minute conversation with a mentor could be the breakthrough you need to solve a problem you’ve been struggling with for months, or even years.
It’s important to find a mentor who is great at your specific problem, not just your business model. We run a PR and branding agency and haven’t taken advice from other agency owners, but we’ve gotten a lot of advice from other business owners who are very experienced in the areas we need. For example, we were really struggling with sales, so we used Cole Gordon as a mentor to help us get our sales systems in place.
Related: How Expert Mentorship Can Boost Your Startup’s Success
2. Preparation for scale-up
Whether you intend to scale or not, growing requires systematization of your product/service offering and how you execute it on the backend. We were once an agency that only offered custom/customized products to our clients and executed the accounts accordingly.
This made it difficult to onboard new customers and find employees to manage their accounts, and made it impossible for the founders and I to step away from the day-to-day customer-facing work. At this stage, and even now, we are always asking ourselves, “Is this solution scalable? Does this solution solve our problem today, or will it solve our problem tomorrow?”
Asking these questions helped us avoid spending a lot of time and money implementing changes that weren’t necessary.
Related: 7 Key Ways to Grow Your Startup or Business
3. When to hire new employees
While our sales department began to grow exponentially, we faced another problem: talent retention. We found that it took an average of 90 days for new hires, regardless of experience, to understand their role and work independently. We found ourselves in a position where we had to turn away clients in order to succeed with our current client list.
After speaking with our network contact, Jeff Sekinger, we learned that many other companies faced similar challenges. Jeff solved this problem by investing in and developing talent up front. Following his guidance, we started hiring new employees every week, and it changed everything for us.
Hiring new people every week or every other week was a big investment initially, but it gave our team time to get organized and enabled us to triple the number of new clients we could onboard each month. As our team grew rapidly, we promoted some of our existing members to management roles, which was a big turning point for the team. By handing them over to the day-to-day operations of account success, onboarding and training new employees, etc., it allowed the founders and I to take a step back and invest our time in other areas of the business that desperately needed our attention.
4. Understand your team’s actual bandwidth capabilities
Over the past six months, we struggled to understand how much time our team could actually allocate to work in a day. It was primarily based on each member’s perceived bandwidth capacity, not actual data. By implementing time tracking software, we were able to understand our team’s true capacity. It became clear which clients were taking too long relative to their retainer value, and pinpointed specific tasks that were taking too long to complete.
We increased compensation for some of our clients depending on the amount of services they require. This increase allowed our team to handle more accounts without sacrificing their weekly workload. Additionally, we streamlined many of our procedures and tasks to increase efficiency, allowing our team to focus on delivering on their KPIs instead of tedious administrative tasks that aren’t really needed at the end of the day.
Related: 3 proven strategies to drive employee success
Over time, the data has shed light on our actual client to account executive ratios, which has been extremely helpful in helping us continue to grow at the rate we want to.
We believe our agency’s journey is truly unique in the industry. Rather than simply filling roles and focusing solely on the bottom line, we paid close attention to the culture we’ve created along the way. Our goal has been to maximize and value the potential and contributions of every single team member.
These processes will remain in place as we strive for continued growth and sustained success. As the saying goes, “Take care of your employees and they will take care of your business.”
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