Focus on scaling the people

For any company, people are an important asset, but for companies in the hypergrowth phase, it is crucial for continued business success. The late Steve Jobs of Apple summed up the importance of talent with this advice: “Go after the cream of the cream. A small team of A+ players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players.”

Companies need to get it right when it comes to hiring to support hypergrowth, such as hiring top talent, based on the company’s needs. Creating a hiring plan will help the team prioritise. Determine which specific roles must be filled on an immediate basis and hire accordingly.

The organisation may need to adjust the org chart appropriately and often. Onboarding, training such as ‘top talent’ programmes, and agile performance management will help maintain focus on what is best for the company.

Create short, inspirational objectives (OKRs) supported by hard metrics that will help measure progress towards the objectives. Outlining the dependencies between individuals and teams, is critical in a massively growing organisation and time well spent.

Culture

In addition to attracting and retaining the best talent, focus on the company culture is crucial. What was considered quirky or interesting in the beginning may not be enough to retain talent later.

Rapid growth means that there are often many exceptional opportunities, from different directions. Reaffirming and re-articulating the vision ensures that people don’t waste time and resources on opportunities that are not relevant.

Developing a strong culture is crucial. Being clear about the company’s strengths, weaknesses, risks, and opportunities, as well as underlying values will help maintain the culture.

Rapid decision making and learning cycles, which allow for rapid iteration and experimentation allow the organisation to sustain innovation, test leading-edge ideas and move forward with action-oriented decisions.

Finally, preventing burnout and allowing employees a healthy work-life balance are essential components of a successful hypergrowth culture.

Connecting people, process, and tech – that will be the ‘game changer’

There is a fine line between organisational agility and getting bogged down in slow-moving bureaucracy. Heavy processes and written planning protocols are not critical tools in hypergrowth companies.

Lean processes, simple structures and scalable operations are assisted by clear and well-tested management practices. It’s important to monitor IT systems’ capacity and scale within the company, to remain nimble while preventing breakdowns.

It’s worth regularly revisiting any under-developed processes as well as risk assessments until the company reaches scale to maintain innovation and agility. Once the company starts to enter the post-hypergrowth phase, develop the operational team and devote time and effort to building the structures and processes.

For merging organisations, developing strong, standardised operational processes are critical, particularly for companies who are growing through mergers and acquisitions as part of their growth plans. Businesses with separate networks, processes, billing systems will only be consolidated at a financial level.

Our unicorn customer Bitpanda want to make it easier for teams to access, analyse and report on critical financial and performance data, which will help shorten planning cycles and increase forecast accuracy as the company focuses on scaling to new markets.

Decentralised decision-making

Given the pace of growth, decisions are being made at breakneck speed. Several successful companies have described their decision making as iterative, fast, and experimental.

At any point, something crucial about the business could change, so decision paralysis is not something that hypergrowth companies can afford. Once leadership has set a new priority, the business’s attention is focused on the changes needed to reach the next milestone.

Clarifying who can decide what and at what level is critical for agility and ‘getting things done’. Encouraging working groups, supported with comprehensive information that allows for agile scenario planning will drive innovation.

Foster a can-do culture, by instilling high business standards and values, and trust employees to do the right thing. Enabling people to make decisions based on accurate data, will allow the organisation to be more than robust; it drives growth.

For further information, including details on the hidden productivity killer, spreadsheets and the latest hypergrowth trends, download our full hypergrowth whitepaper.

In our final blog of this series, we’ll be exploring advanced analytics and why they should be at the heart of decision making, so keep an eye on our social channels where we’ll be publishing details.