Startups are everywhere these days, and not just in Silicon Valley. It seems like every new business is calling itself a startup, thereby riding the wave of positive vibes for these scrappy, 80-hour work week organizations that can and will do anything to get ahead. But at what point does the “startup mentality” start to wear on the employees? Probably sooner than you’d think.
The startup mentality brings with it a couple of expectations:
- The owner/founder/CEO works just as hard as everyone else
- Everyone wears lots of hats and jumps in to help out, even if the job isn’t entirely in their job description
- Low pay and long hours are expected, because the investment of time will pay off later
- The company is flexible and agile, ready to change focus, move fast, and even change strategy if something better comes along
These expectations work great for really young companies that still have to find their way in the market and build a cohesive brand. So when do companies stop reacting to every new opportunity that comes along and start taking a more thoughtful approach to business?
Unfortunately, many companies outgrow their startup mentality long before they’re ready to let go of the bad habits it instilled in employees. That necessary 60-hour workweek starts to look less appealing after a few years, and a greater influx of working capital makes it less forgivable to assign work outside of the job description. Before long employees jump ship at the first sight of stable land in the distance.
How do you retain those scrappy startup workers? Start thinking like an enterprise company. Given that every rule has a couple of exceptions, enterprise and multinational companies have to define plans, formalize communication protocols, and implement processes and systems that give structure to how the company’s business gets done.
Company-Wide Strategy
A startup can run for a long time on just the founder’s vision of how they’ll disrupt the market, but after the market’s fully disrupted, where will the company go next? Employees need a vision to follow and a goal to work for, or they can easily get bogged down in the day to day drudgery.
It’s the founder’s job to outline a vision, the manager’s jobs to translate that vision into manageable workloads, and the individual contributor’s job to deliver on the work. Companies who want to move out of the startup mentality should define the company’s long-term goals in defined and obtainable terms and then outline the smaller goals that build up to overall success.
Human Resources Upgrades
So many startup companies look at the introduction of HR employees as the death of fun: think Toby in The Office. But adding a human resources professional can help establish a company’s culture and define processes for hiring, benefits, and worker protections that established companies need to attract and retain the best hires.
A good human resources professional will do more than payroll and update everyone’s W-2 in the human resources software (although that is an important part of their job). A human resources professional can find the best benefits plan within the company’s budget, help teams source and hire the best employees to fill open roles, and advocate for shorter workweeks or for team members who want to spend more time with their families.
Build Relationships with CRM
Startup sales and marketing teams are all about the fresh leads: where can we attract new and exciting customers to expand the target audience and sell more. But mature companies understand the power of their existing customers for recurring revenue that sustains the business long-term. A simple way to build and maintain relationships is by maintaining your contact records in your CRM.
When you track each customer interaction and purchase within your CRM, you have a written record of that customer’s lifetime value. Your sales team should regularly mine their CRM data to better understand the target customer and learn where upsell and further engagement opportunities lie. And communication about leads shouldn’t always just flow from marketing to sales. Sales teams should return lists of high-value customers to marketing for email re-engagement campaigns to deepen existing relationships.
Communication Protocols
In a 5-person startup, communication is easy: team members can call out successes and failures for everyone in the garage-turned-office space to hear. But once the team starts to grow and maybe include remote employees, how will teams communicate with one another and with the team as a whole?
- A communication protocol outlines -- on paper (or in the cloud) where everyone has easy access -- how team members:
- Communicate successes to the entire team
- Communicate failures and next steps to the entire team
- Request assistance from another team or team member
- Teach internal processes to new team members
- Communicate progress toward business goals
Technology can help with a lot of these communication issues. The development team may maintain a wiki site to document internal processes. The marketing and sales teams may contribute to shared team folders on a document management tool. The entire company can gather around data visualization tools with dashboards showing progress toward short and long-term goals.
The difference between a true startup and a company running without a plan isn’t that much, but with a little work, companies can step back from the day to day frenzy of the competitive marketplace and get organized like an enterprise.
Tamara Scott is Research and Content Manager for TechnologyAdvice.com. She writes about the intersection of technology, business, and education in Nashville, TN.
