Build before you need it

One of the things I learned from scaling a company from 3 to around 150 people: Build for growth before you need it.

When we started the company, I had already experienced the not-so-fun side of rapid growth.

Processes breaking down. New people not knowing how things work. Leaders becoming bottlenecks. Everyone running faster to compensate.

So this time, I wanted to try something different.

We introduced structured processes while we were still small. For strategy and building culture, onboarding and how to run meetings. Honestly, at the time it probably looked like overkill.

But then we grew.

And grew.

Suddenly, having structure wasn't overkill at all. It gave us capacity to grow without having to reinvent everything every few months.

I think there is a leadership lesson here that is easy to forget: Don't wait for the organization to break before you start building what it needs next.

And this isn't only about processes.

It is even more important when it comes to leadership.

Today, after 15 years of working with leadership teams through Brainwells, I would probably put even more emphasis on building leadership capacity early.

Because the organization you have today might work perfectly well with the leadership you have today. The interesting question is:

Will it still work when you are twice the size?