Healthy organizations require long-term thinking. If you focus solely on everyday operations, you might miss the fact that soon you will need to create a new role simply because the need has not manifested itself clearly yet.
Be strategic about the way you develop your company. Don’t wait till the need for a certain role is obvious – if it is, there is a good chance it is already too late. And if you need hiring support, just let me know.
To review your hiring priorities, see the cheat sheet below.
30 employees
By the time your team reaches 30 employees, your role as a founder has changed. You have hired specialists who took over some areas. You still work closely with them but you don’t do the work yourself anymore. You also started losing visibility on everything that happens in the company so you started gathering data, as well as making data-driven decisions and introduced OKR and KPIs (if you haven’t yet).
50 employees
By the time your team reaches 50 employees, you have started to manage managers. You make your first executive experiences, which require from you all new set of skills. Since you don’t have any more control over execution, culture becomes a strong managing factor. You might have started losing or risk losing people who joined you early on and enjoyed high visibility, impact, quick decision making because things tend to be more bureaucratic. So you have paid lots of attention to ensuring transparency and inclusion while not losing decision-making speed.
75 employees
By the time your team reaches 75 employees, your role is mainly executive. You manage the managers and focus on setting them up for success long term. Since it is not a small company anymore, any changes are much more complicated. You have started spending more time thinking about strategy, tactics, and culture.
100 employees
By the time your team reaches 100 employees, people in your company likely rarely speak to 70% of their colleagues (and they don’t even know the names of 40%). Ensuring good cooperation and flow of information, team building, communication, and culture becomes critical topics. Also, your Employee Value Proposition needs serious adjustments since you can no longer offer the startup experience you did in the beginning.