How to go from 5 to 55 employees in just a couple of months… without losing your mind or your sleep
• Did your Startup/business go from a very small team of just a few to a few dozens in just a couple of months? Making it almost impossible to coordinate the teams properly or even know who should be doing what.
• Is delegating your dream, but you just don’t feel like things are organized enough to really let go of control?
• Do you feel that the more people you hire the more work you have?
• Is your team getting frustrated as they don’t feel they are working at their full potential?
• Are valuable staff members starting to leave without a real apparent reason?
If you can relate to one or more of these bullet points, then this article may be for you.
Human beings, specially we, the entrepreneurial type, when exposed to a new path, change or the creation of our own business/Startup, we tend to focus mainly in preventing disasters. We get all kinds of worst case scenarios in our heads and focus our sole energy in giving solutions to all possible “What ifs» that could derail our businesses:
• if it doesn’t work?
• if we can´t get enough money?
• if we don´t reach the right market?
• if our product/service is not good/attractive enough?
• And the list goes on…
But sometimes our biggest challenge doesn´t come from the perils of the world out there but from the insides of our own organization.
Forcing us to learn a big lesson:
«A business can die from extreme drought as well as from a major flood”
And funny enough, sometimes our success is the one bringing that mayor flood.
So, how can we manage going from 3 to 33
without losing our mind or our sleep?
Whoever is or has been in this situation knows that one of the biggest challenges in creating a solid business, is managing its human factor without losing our mind or our patience.
This article is not meant to solve all your current issues just by reading it, but for you to get a better understanding and get you to start walking in the right direction.
So, let’s start by approaching this issue in a creative but ancient manner, the way the Egyptians approached their challenges more than 7 000 years ago with the river Nile overflowing their land each year.
How?
→ By creating a network of dikes, dams, and canals to divert the flood waters to the fields.
And how do we apply it to our business?
Well that is easy, here are the definitions:
• The fields: the areas in your organization that need to grow, to be fed, to be taking care of.
• The dikes: the resources, incomes, expenses
• The dams: the cash flow
• The flood: clients, markets, new staff, new products/services
And last but not least:
• The Canals: human resources, channels of communication, organisation, software, and so on.
Let’s put it in practice then
Take a pen and paper, and start by looking at your organization
♦ On the side A, you will start by defining, one by one, the following bullet points:
• where does the “water” gets stuck
• where are the “canals” not wide enough
• which “fields” are not getting watered properly
• and which are dying of flooding…
♦ And on the side B of your paper, write the possible solutions and small changes you can implement, to each one of those bullet points, and start improving the main issues that are keeping you awake at night
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