I like to think of this stage as your first proper growth spurt as a business. 0-10 usually feels more scrappy, unstructured, and involves hiring ‘friendlies’ who you already know or have possibly worked with before.

Growing from 11-30 however feels much different, especially if you’ve handled all the elements mentioned in my above sections.

You should now have clearly defined Mission, Vision, Values and Behaviours to preach about in your hiring process and plaster all over your Job Adverts. You should have a more formal structure for hiring and onboarding which makes the process feel way quicker, and smoother. You’ve also got tooling in place to handle your new growing teams needs. And you likely feel in control because you’ve started to map out the org chart - you know what’s coming 🔭

But there are some key things you MUST think about now without getting carried away

What you need to focus on:

• Hire your first People person (and possibly Talent person)
• Feedback, Feedback, Feedback
• Team Rituals
• Founder Presence
• Resist Process!
• Stay grounded
• Rally the troops - Keep them calm, remind them of the plan

Why Now?

• 🤝 Hire Your First People Person (and possible Talent person) It’s time to get serious with your People Strategy, and start thinking about getting some operational help. You’ve done a heap yourself already, but the growth spurt from 11+ will knock you for six if you’re not careful. You’ll be trying to proactively look at your strategy, but will start dealing with day to day operational questions, and challenges, and you need help. At this stage, avoid going big and thinking you need to hire a VP People or Chief People Officer. For me, I’d utilise both of the below options:

1. Hire a permanent People Ops Exec (c.2-5 years experience in People Ops), someone who can hit the ground running, put basic policies, processes in place and handle systems, and employee queries, but also work with you strategic projects

2. Find a Fractional Sr People Leader who can work with you 1-2 days a week perhaps on continuing to build out People Strategy, so that you can step back a little from that and focus on your core role as founder as the business starts to gather momentum (You’ll need the extra time to connect with your team (see below). So some senior help is absolutely useful and worthwhile at this stage, but you don’t need it full time.

As an aside, you ‘might’ want to start thinking about what hiring plans look like over the next 12 months - this will vary business to business so isn’t a hard an fast rule, but my suggestion is if you have 2-3 roles per month to fill for the next 12 months, look at hiring a Talent Partner too. You could always go down the FTC route for 6-12 months to keep it flexible or look at Embedded Talent companies - super flexible contracts and they tend to deliver well. You can check out a few suggestions I know of here

• 🗣 Feedback, Feedback, Feedback Now you’re starting to get more people through the door, and onboarded you have more opportunity to very quickly understand how well your new processes are working. It’s vital you don’t just assume they work. If you have your People hire sorted, then they can help you on working with employee feedback and surveys around specific process. And you can then start to understand what you need to tweak, or change before you start scaling even more. This is a really great chance for you to nail this now.
• 🏉 Team Rituals Some people might suggest looking at this at an earlier stage. You can do, but I personally like to wait until theres a few more people in the company and things are gathering pace. By now you have more people to input, contribute ideas etc.

Rituals are important, especially as you grow. People will grow apart, speak to and see other other less, be less involved in small daily wins and decisions. How you come back together as a team to talk, celebrate and keep building that bond is key.

This is a great time to get the team together and start thinking about what ‘rituals’ you have in place- regular meetings like all-hands or townhalls and stand-ups, maybe more informal ‘tea breaks’ for people to jump on calls and chat. And how do you celebrate wins like promotions and new customers etc.

let your team help you decide on this. Don’t stress about it being perfect- I promise whatever you put in place will change as you grow. You need to make sure you are always evaluating this and making sure it’s right for everyone.

• 👀 Founder Presence By now you might be finding that close to 30 people is very different to 5. Your time is stretched, you have to make decisions without including the same people as before, and you see your team less that you might’ve done previously.

It’s vital you try to double down on protecting some time for you team in some way or another. Never, ever let them drop to the bottom of the list in terms of diary priorities. Or you will quickly start to lose them. Show them you are there, available and you’re putting them first. Most people will need to proactively think about how they manage this in order to make sure they are being present and allocating time for the growing team.

• ✅ Resist Process! I guarantee you things will start to go wrong more often at this stage. Small things maybe, but you’ll be in full swing of setting some basic structure around core processes that there’s a danger you start to try to put bigger processes in place to fix even the tiniest issue. Dont.

You’re still small, you still have that freedom, speed, nimbleness that a start up has and it’s a real USP still for you, so don’t start trying to assume you have to fix every small bump in the road with a new process right now.

If ever you feel you need one, stop, pause and really look at ‘why’ you think you need something. If possible consult with your team too- you have some great minds in that business so use them.

• 🧘‍♀️ Stay Grounded Around this time you’ll hit a point where everything just feels like it’s working really nicely. Apart from the odd bump in the road (above), processes work, everything is smooth and working and you’ll have this temptation to just go full steam ahead, ‘we’ve cracked it’ you’ll think. You need to stay grounded, and think about all the points above. Keep getting feedback, understand how things will change culturally if you grow too fast. And be prepared because I promise you, when you go fro 30 to 50 and 50-100, everything changes again, so keep your feet on the ground!