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Every startup dreams of quick and lasting success. However, achieving significant revenue growth stays a challenge for many entrepreneurs. You should be consistently able to adapt, experiment, and improve processes.
Recently, our organization, recognized by Inc. as one of its Fastest Growing Companies for 2024, celebrated one other milestone: in lower than six months, we built a high-performing team of over 20 talented individuals from a startup team of just three.
1. Finding Normal mentors for problem immediately
In 2023, we put a big focus on growing our network of mentors and partners who had already experienced what we were going through at the time and successfully transitioned to where we desired to be. It was an invaluable investment of time and money.
As business owners, it’s easy to hunt advice from peers in the industry, and sometimes that advice might be great, but getting advice from someone who is further along in their business trip is so much more invaluable. A straightforward 20-minute conversation with a mentor can provide the breakthrough it’s worthwhile to solve a problem you’ve been struggling with for months or even years.
Finding mentors who excel at a specific problem, not only a business model, is key. We have a PR and branding agency and we never got advice from other agency owners, but we did get a lot of recommendation from other business owners who were very experienced in areas where it was needed. For example, we were struggling HUGE with sales, so we enlisted the mentorship of Cole Gordon to assist us implement our sales systems.
2. Preparing to scale
Whether the intention is to scale or not, to grow, it’s worthwhile to systematize your product/service offering and the way it is executed in the back office. We was once an agency that only offered clients custom/tailored offerings and executed accounts accordingly.
This created difficulty in acquiring latest customers and finding staff to administer our accounts, stopping our founder and me from with the ability to step back from the day-to-day tasks of customer achievement. At that stage, and even now, we are all the time asking, “Is this solution scalable?” and “Does this solution solve a problem for now or for the future?”
Asking ourselves these questions saved us from wasting hours and money making changes that weren’t vital.
3. When to rent latest employees
While our sales began to grow tremendously, we faced one other challenge: finding talent. We found that it took an average of 90 days for latest hires to grasp their role in our company and work independently, no matter experience or inexperience. We needed to turn away clients to make sure we’d achieve success with our current client list.
After talking to a contact in our network, Jeff Sekinger, we discovered that many other firms were struggling with similar issues. Jeff solved this problem by investing in and developing talent ahead of time. Following his example, we hired a latest worker every week, which modified all the things for us.
Hiring someone latest every week or every other week was initially a costly investment, but it gave our team time to get up and running and allowed us to triple the number of recent clients we could bring on each month. As our team grew rapidly, we promoted some of our current team members to management positions, which was a game-changer for our team. Putting them in charge of day-to-day operations, including account success and onboarding and training latest hires, allowed our founder and I to step back and invest our time in other areas of the business that desperately needed our attention.
4. Understand the real capability of your teams
For the past six months, we’ve been trying to grasp how much time our team can really put into a workday. This was mostly based on the perceived throughput of each member, moderately than actual data. By implementing time tracking software, we were in a position to see the true capabilities of our team. It highlighted which clients were taking on too much of their time relative to their retainer and pinpointed specific tasks that were taking far too long to finish.
We increased some of our clients based on the amount of services they needed from us. This improvement allowed our team to handle more accounts without compromising their weekly workload. Additionally, we streamlined many procedures and tasks to extend efficiency, allowing the team to focus more on KPIs moderately than tedious administrative tasks that were not likely needed at the end of the day.
Over time, the data has shown us the true customer to worker ratio, which has proven invaluable to us because it has allowed us to keep up the growth rates we expect.
I would love to consider that our agency journey is truly unique in the industry. Beyond simply filling roles and focusing solely on revenue, we paid close attention to the culture we created along the way. Our goal was to maximise and value the potential and contributions of every team member.
As we try for continued growth and lasting success, these processes will remain in place – as the saying goes, “Take care of your people and your people will take care of your business.”