In the “Web 2.0” startups of today, innumerable technology choices are the topics of the day when talking about scaling the business. Countless hours and meetings are spent debating the virtues of Ruby on Rails, Amazon Web Services and server virtualization. A fortunate few companies find themselves in the enviable position of having to devote even more time and attention to even more critical, non-technical scaling challenges. When a startup delivers a product to market that fulfills a clear customer need, sometimes the biggest challenge can be addressing that demand with operational scale. In a market with so many startups and established companies competing for dollars, customers and talent, outstanding people and defined processes are vital to any business that is hoping to scale successfully. I encourage the teams that I work with that are lucky enough to be in this situation to answer two key questions to determine whether they are set up to scale effectively.

First, are there any single points of failure amongst your people and processes? A challenge with so many startups is that there a small handful of the oldest employees who have the majority of the business, technical and product knowledge contained within themselves. Pitching the product clearly, implementing customers or addressing bugs can all be bottlenecks to success if only a single expert can manage those tasks. Systematizing the dissemination of knowledge through various media, and importantly, through person-to-person guidance, is as important to scaling a business as documenting code is to scaling an engineering team. Further, even if several people have the ability to execute as needed, without clearly defined processes, those people may be ineffective, inefficient and demoralized. That is not to say that bureaucracy and rigid rules are needed to scale a business. On the contrary, a process that is both flexible and regularly modified based on business needs can aid in delivering consistently good performance.

Second, are you hiring and transferring knowledge to make yourself obsolete? The first step is being disciplined about hiring only the best people for your organization. That doesn’t mean that you are hiring the smartest, the most educated or the most accomplished people. Instead, the goal is to hire people who have the skills and the values needed to be successful within your organization. I hesitate to use a term as soft as “values”, but the importance of a shared culture, commitment and vision can’t be overemphasized during the development of a young company. If you are successful in making yourself obsolete, not only have you hired great people, you’ve supplied them with the tools, knowledge and processes needed to do their job (previously yours) consistently well. 

So is your organization built to scale? If you’re lucky, you’ll get to find out, because the opposite of scaling isn’t nearly as fun or rewarding!