IMPORTANT NOTICE!
Starting a business can be a pain, but the decision to expand a business might be an agony as it proves to be nerve-racking not only for founders and investors but for the whole team. Indeed, there are a lot of hurdles that might seem practically impossible to overcome. For instance, just in a matter of months, you might need to double your development team and office staff, completely rearrange your company structure, ramp up your production and even move or at least transform your office space. You also need to analyze new markets, customers, and processes.
Moreover, the growth also means that some additional capital will be required, causing new responsibilities to shareholders, investors, and institutional lenders. That raises another host of issues about how to set up all processes to enhance the organization’s core capabilities and reach success. However, on the other hand, business expansion, when properly done, leads to a solid financial fortunes increase both for owners and employees. Plus, you can significantly boost your target audience engagement, bring more value to your product. So, you should be getting ready for more enthusiastic customers, positive sales numbers and increased opportunities in general.
Prerequisites of the Scaling Your Startup Tech Team
One important aspect to mention as you grow your startup team: everything should be done when it’s time to. In other words, to grow your business in a smooth and productive manner, first ensure that it’s ready to be expanded. The signs your startup is ready to be scaled are as follows:
- Your business needs good cross-functional cooperation and alignment
- There’s a definite necessity to build your team because all of your team members in different departments cannot cope with the tasks they face on a daily basis.
- You feel the necessity to better keep up with the demand and workload.
- You always strive for innovation.
- Your business requires some new candidates and you want to open some job positions for the first time ever.
How to wisely and sustainably scale your startup and tech team
When it comes to growing your startup team, there are many things you should do. Let’s cover the scaling tech basics.
- First and foremost, remember that there is no one-size-fits-all approach. That’s why it’s of paramount importance to begin with the honest assessment of your business strengths and weaknesses. Ensure you properly understand which questions you need to ask yourself and which metrics to prioritize upon determining the expansion roadmap.
- Follow this golden rule as you manage your business: “A meaningful, long-term, profitable growth is a by-product of effective, skillful management and planning.” As a matter of fact, effective research and a long-range planning can do a lot to relieve the issues coming with a snap business expansion.
- Think about all startup resources your business might need and think about where you can get them and what you should do to get them. Don’t forget that you might want to become bigger, so ensure you are scaling a startup from its beginning.
- Properly set your team as your startup grows: no matter where you are, start to hire the best professionals in the area. Yes, even when you have just started building your product, even when it’s not that easy to find the right people, don’t save money and time on resources; a good skill set makes the core of your business well-being. So, ensure you are hiring people that can enrich your business.
- Choose the technology stack ( a combination of programming languages, tools, and frameworks that the software engineers use to develop your product) with the expansion in mind. Ask your company tech teams to determine the technology stack that maps most economically and efficiently to your particular problem set, but offers hight growth ways.
Once the technology stack is chosen, run through a checklist, which includes the following:
- Your technology stack guarantees advanced-level data security (data encryption, anti-theft prevention, secure hosting, multiple level authentication, GDPR compliance, and etc.)
- Your technology stack still leaves you further ways to expand your business. Luckily, there are numerous ways to scale your technology these days.
- You’ve chosen a modern-day technology stack coming with a big software engineer community and a decent amount of learning materials.
- Decide upon the talent you need and the ways to get it, especially when it comes to project management and developers. When it comes to scaling your startup, decide whether to hire local talent or bring yours. Just for the record, Uber hires local people who better understand the local landscape rather than relocating team members from its head office to those regions.
- Maintain the proper corporate culture – ensure that every member of your growing startup team is fully committed to what you do. A startup can quickly flourish during its early stages only when its entire team is involved in every aspect of the project – your team members know its core functionality and can adapt quickly to new challenges.
- Establish, update and automate all of your business operations systems to accurately and effectively perform daily tasks, such as cash flow monitoring, inventories and deliveries tracking, finances and human resources data management. You might also want to invest in more sophisticated communication systems in order to provide A-level support to various business operations.
- Set expert top managers to cover all areas your fast growing business has to deal with: the more markets you have, the tougher it is to concentrate on any of them. And If there is a strong local competitor in any of those markets, it is likely to conquer you.
- Ensure that your clients receive the attention and service they demand.
- Provide the needed security. Indeed, security is one of the software building issues that should never be neglected.
Key Takeaways
With the fast rise of the Internet together with an almost instant universal connection, the ability to scale a startup has brought both tremendous growth and numerous challenges. Your business might bring a number of perspectives, ranging from happier customers to novel markets and countries.
Still, when growing your startup business, it’s always crucial for your team to keep in mind the other side of the business scale. A lack of ecosystem and structure, for instance, might lead to wrong capital distribution. Pick the wrong business development strategy, and your business might become of your biggest nightmares. Indeed, scaling your business is crucial if you want to build a successful product.
Therefore, to succeed in this tough trip to the sky, use the metrics described above and don’t forget that a meaningful, long-term, and profitable growth is a by-product of effective, detailed and expert management and planning combined with good teams. And as you find people for your business, ensure that every your team member matters because people make the halfway of any successful business. By the way, as you grow your startup, Artelogic, with its years of experience in effective product development implementation and as a growing tech stack provider, can become your strong IT executor. Building a team and developing a product made simple with Artelogic.
