Customers & People: The key to scaling any business

[STorrence]

Customers & People: The key to scaling any business

The number of scale-ups has grown so fast over the past 10 years that it’s easy to forget that only 1 out of 200 start-ups become a scale-up. 

People describe scaling-up as an art - I don’t know if that’s true or not. It is incredibly complex and often it’s hard to fully recognise all the success factors. 

Prior to my current role as CMO at Earthly, I worked in 5 startups - 3 that successfully scaled and reached unicorn/IPO, 1 that was acquired, and 1 that stalled and never achieved its growth ambitions. In my experience there are two critical growth drivers every scale-up must focus on: Customers and People. 

Before diving into these key topics, remember that if you’re an entrepreneur who has built a start-up that has the potential to scale, this is already a success on its own. It means that you’ve reached a point that many never do. You’ve put together a product that a core group of customers love and you’ve brought together a team that is passionate and committed to your mission. 

Customer Growth

Now how do you go beyond that core group of customers? There are a variety of ways. Expanding your Marketing efforts should be one of your first steps. This will increase your costs because you’ll need to hire resources and spend more on promotional channels. But it doesn’t have to be a massive jump in cost. No matter how many Marketing channels you use, how large your team is or how big your budget is, word-of-mouth will almost always be your most important lead source at this stage of growth. This is challenging because it’s not easy to track and control, but without it you’re wasting budget and not optimizing the time of your Sales & Marketing teams. 

How you go about building word-of-mouth varies depending on your product/service. The first step is to make sure that your customers/users are having a great experience that they want to talk about. If your customers are not having a great experience or you don’t know if they are, fix that first. Then you can create referral programs, request reviews, build customer stories, and so much more. 

You can also grow your customer base by expanding your market reach. With digital solutions, it’s much less expensive and resource intensive to reach a global audience. But don’t think that means it’s easy. You still need to adjust for language, culture, time zone, behavior, etc. 

At Earthly, we work with businesses of any size and in any geography because we want to help all companies create successful climate journeys. However, we focus Sales and Marketing efforts in key markets so our team and budgets aren't spread too thin. Although our team is global and we speak a wide variety of languages, our website and product platform are currently only available in English. Because we are constantly releasing new features and updating content, we know we couldn’t maintain a strong customer experience if we tried to localize or attempt to do too many things at once. At this stage of growth, prioritizing resources is essential.

In the push for customer growth, be sure to put a strong focus on your brand. Ensure that your brand can help you cut through the noise that bombards us all. Do not sacrifice brand identity or reputation for tactical wins. This is hard to do as a start-up, although if you can, you’re definitely on the road to scaling successfully. But once you reach the scale-up phase, you need to change the mindset of your entire organization - to value and protect the brand. 

People

This topic could (and should) be its own blog series but I’ll try to keep it short and focus in on key areas:

Diversity & Inclusion

Hopefully, if you’ve reached this point in growth you’ve already consulted with a DEI expert. If you haven’t, you should do so asap. Start-ups have an advantage because you have a clean slate and can ensure that diversity & inclusion is an integral part of your DNA. Be sure to focus on both diversity and inclusion - don’t mistakenly treat them as the same. 

Recruitment

This is the point where you may think about moving from generalists to specialists. But be cautious. Moving to specialists has significant ramifications and can bloat your organization. We’re seeing some results of this now as many scale-ups and unicorns realize that they’ve over invested in too many specialist skills too early. 

Instead of specialists, try to hire T-shape roles - employees who have deep knowledge in a core function but who also possess skills and/or a desire to be involved in adjacent functions. For example, my role at Earthly is CMO. I’m currently taking Google’s UX Design course, not because I plan to change fields but because we aren’t yet at the stage to have an in-house website designer. By learning more about it myself, I can make small fixes, work with freelancers/agencies more effectively and when the time comes I’ll have the knowledge needed to hire the right profile. 

Experience Levels

I believe T-shape hires have the strongest potential to move into more senior roles. Which is a good segue to a common challenge for scale-ups - junior vs mid-level vs senior hires. 

If you think of the typical start-up as being founder(s) plus interns/entry-level roles, you will definitely need to adjust as you prepare to scale-up. Although you will need a few key senior roles, if you can keep them at a minimum and bring in mid-level T-shape profiles, you will give your business the agility it needs to drive growth while staying lean. An approach we use as Earthly is to leverage mentors and advisors to help upskill our team and provide senior expertise. 

When you do bring in senior profiles, make sure they are comfortable being hands-on. Otherwise, you will have lots of ideas and not enough hands to do the work. 

I could easily turn this blog into a book, but I’ll avoid that. The scale-up journey has its challenges, but I do believe it is the most exciting time in any business. Earthly is fast approaching our transition from scale-up to start-up. With 20 employees, 500 customers and the right focus areas, I can’t wait for the journey ahead and the many milestone moments we’ll celebrate.

If you found this post helpful and have specific questions, feel free to contact me on Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn.