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Every startup dreams of fast and sustainable success. Yet, achieving significant revenue growth remains a challenge for many entrepreneurs. You must constantly be willing to adapt, experiment and refine processes.
Recently, our organization, now recognized as one of Inc.'s fastest-growing companies for 2024, celebrated another milestone: in less than six months, we built a high-performing team of over 20 talented individuals from a startup team of just three people.
1. Finding the right mentors for the problem right now
In 2023, we placed a significant emphasis on increasing our network of mentors and partners who had already experienced what we were going through at the time and had successfully pushed through to where we wanted to be. It has been an invaluable time and monetary investment.
As business owners, it can be easy to seek advice from peers within your industry, and sometimes, that advice can be great, but getting advice from someone who is farther ahead in their business journey is much more invaluable. A simple 20-minute conversation with a mentor could provide the breakthrough needed to solve an issue you've been struggling with for months or even years.
Finding mentors excelling in your specific issue, not just your business model, is crucial. We have a PR and branding agency, and we never got counsel from other agency owners, but we did get a lot of advice from other business owners who were hyper-experienced in areas of need. For example, we struggled BIG time on our sales side, so we utilized Cole Gordon for mentorship, which helped us get our sales systems in place.
Related: How Expert Mentoring Fuels Startup Success
2. Setting yourself up to scale
Whether the intention is to scale or not, to grow, you will need to systemize your product/service offering and how you execute it on the backend. We were once an agency that only offered custom/tailored offerings to clients and executed the accounts accordingly.
This created difficulties in onboarding new clients and finding employees who could manage our accounts, preventing our founder and me from stepping back from the daily client fulfillment tasks. During this stage, and even now, we always ask, "Is this solution scaleable?" and "Does this solution solve for right now, or does it solve for a future problem?"
Asking these questions saved us from spending countless hours and money on implementing change that wasn't needed.
Related: 7 Crucial Ways To Scale Your Startup or Business
3. When to hire new employees
While our sales side started growing tremendously, we were faced with another problem. Finding talent. We found that new hires took, on average, 90 days to grasp their role at our firm and work independently, whether they came experienced or not. We faced turning down clients to ensure that we could succeed with our current client list.
After chatting with a contact in our network, Jeff Sekinger, we discovered that many other businesses faced similar struggles. Jeff solved this problem by investing in and building up talent ahead of time. Following his lead, we hired a new employee every week, which changed everything for us.
Hiring someone new every week to every other week was an expensive investment initially, but it gave our team the time to ramp up and allowed us to triple the number of new clients we could onboard each month. As the team grew rapidly, we promoted some of our existing members to management roles, which was a game-changer for our team. Entrusting them with the day-to-day operations, including account success and the onboarding and training of new hires, freed our Founder and myself to step back and invest our time in other areas of the business that desperately needed our attention.
4. Understanding your teams' true bandwidth capabilities
During the last six months, we struggled to understand how much time our team could truly allocate throughout their work day. It was primarily based on each member's perceived bandwidth capabilities rather than on actual data. By implementing time-tracking software, we could see our team's true capabilities. It highlighted which clients were taking up too much time relative to their retainer value and pinpointed specific tasks that were taking far too long to complete.
We increased some of our clients' retainers based on the amount of service they needed from us. This enhancement allowed our team to handle more accounts without compromising their weekly workload. Additionally, we streamlined many procedures and tasks to boost efficiency, enabling the team to focus more on executing KPIs rather than on tedious administrative tasks that weren't truly needed at the end of the day.
Related: Boost Employee Success with These 3 Proven Strategies
Over time, the data showed us the true client-to-account executive ratio, which has been invaluable for us in ensuring we can keep growing as fast as we want to.
I'd like to believe that our agency's journey is truly unique in the industry. Beyond simply filling roles and focusing solely on revenue, we paid close attention to the culture we were creating along the way. Our goal was to maximize and value every team member's potential and contributions.
As we aim for continued growth and sustained success, these processes will remain in place — as they say, "Take care of your people, and your people will take care of your business."
