My business is growing so fast – how do I keep up with it?

It is a strange situation to be not just surviving but thriving, in a time when many other businesses are applying for emergency loans, furloughing staff and retracting from all angles.

Rapid business growth can bring a lot of different stresses and strains to any business – not least because people’s roles evolve as the business expands and your product is in demand but you may be also juggling self isolation, social distancing and remote working within your team making it extra challenging.

People Puzzles founder Ally Maughan explains how to make sure you can still hire and induct the right people, and how CEOs can best manage the changes as well as their own role, which may be unexpected and uncomfortable.

Getting the right people on the team

For many businesses experiencing rapid growth, perhaps to provide necessary services required at the moment or to take advantage of the current opportunity, trying to hire and onboard people quickly, and maybe remotely, can cause a headache.

Both with permanent and temporary hires, you need people you can trust to follow your processes, deliver the service you expect and fly the flag for your company’s brand.

Ally advises that it really helps if you know what good looks like. If you are clear on how they need to behave, what is important to them and how you are going to judge their performance it makes selection a lot easier.

It can mean quicker CV scanning, a simple and short telephone interview to screen for fit, and then perhaps a longer, more in-depth interview either face to face, or on video conferencing.

At People Puzzles we have been running the majority of our recruitment online for the past few years. We have a very clear recruitment process that makes it easy to say yes or no to each candidate. It means recruitment can be run centrally even with a national business, and less recruitment mistakes are made.

Recruiting the wrong person can be expensive and mean a lot of time investment wasted. ‘It’s so important to have an excellent recruitment process and do everything you can – all of the science around good interviewing, potentially psychometric testing and cultural fit – to make sure they’re right for the business,’ Ally says.

Building a high performing team

Once you have hired these new starters to join your rapidly growing team, it is important to quickly teach them what is important in your business, and how you expect them to behave even if you are having to do this remotely.

‘Every business should have a clear induction process’, advises Ally. ‘It isn’t really about the staff handbook. It should include why the business exists, the individual’s place in the bigger story, how to provide an excellent service to clients and what doing a good job really looks like. Unless you are providing this, you are not setting people up to be high performers, and potentially you are even setting them up to fail.’

The evolving role of the CEO

On the back of four years of growth ranging between 20 and 40% per year at People Puzzles, Ally has first-hand experience of the challenges in keeping up with a fast-growing company. ‘In a fast-growing business, your day-to-day role constantly changes and no more so than in the current climate,’ she says.

‘When you have a 40-strong business you can still do everything yourself, make most of the decisions and fix anything that needs fixing. But as the business grows you have to stop doing things that were your job last year, otherwise you are meddling in the jobs your senior team should be doing and risk becoming a bottleneck. The CEO’s role should be to provide clarity, direction, challenge and upholding the company culture.’

Ultimately, Ally recommends getting help with managing rapid growth and change management as the business develops. ‘I think business coaching is absolutely essential,’ she says, ‘as well as having people around you who will give you honest and constructive criticism, and help you to develop your people strategy so that you have a comprehensive approach to getting the best out of your team not just for now, but also the rapidly changing months ahead.’

Over the next few weeks we will be publishing some ideas and guidance for businesses who are in a sector that has suddenly become very busy as a result of Coronavirus, and are struggling to keep up with demand. If you would like to chat it through with one of the team this week, we are still offering our free 30 minute consultations throughout April.

You can get in touch with us at [email protected] or call 0808 164 5826 .