My Mindful Money organizational chart has 25 positions. If I actually launched the company tomorrow with 25 employees, I would probably be out of business pretty quickly. That difference between what the company may eventually look like and what it actually needs at startup has probably been one of the more useful things for me to think through during this course.
At the beginning, there would be a lot of overlap. I would probably be handling finance, forecasting, strategy, and pieces of several other areas. Other early employees would do the same thing. There is nothing wrong with that when the company is small. The problem is that a five-person company’s way of operating probably cannot just be stretched until there are 50 people. At some point, responsibilities have to become clearer. Someone needs authority to make decisions without asking the founder. Processes that only exist in one person’s head need to be documented. Managers become necessary. Communication changes. Things that used to take a two-minute conversation now involve multiple departments.
I think this is where scaling gets difficult because adding structure can feel like adding bureaucracy. Nobody wants a startup with six employees and 40 approval processes. At the same time, nobody wants a 100-person company where nobody knows who can approve anything. For Mindful Money, I would want growth itself to tell us when the structure needs to change. My personnel plan already approaches hiring that way. The company would not add positions simply because they exist on the organizational chart. We would add them when there is enough demand or a large enough bottleneck to justify another person.
I would have to change too. I like details. I like understanding the numbers and knowing why something happened. That can be useful when a company is small because the founder probably should understand almost everything happening in the business. At a larger scale, trying to remain involved in everything would eventually slow everyone else down. That might actually be one of the better ways to tell whether a startup has successfully grown into a real organization: it can make good decisions and continue operating without the founder being involved in every one of them. If Mindful Money could not function without me touching everything, then I would not have really built a scalable company. I would have just built a much larger version of my own job.
Reference
Wasserman, N. (2013). The Founder’s Dilemmas. Princeton University Press.