45+ Resources and Tips You Need While Scaling a Business

Do you remember when everybody at your company stayed in the loop without any sort of formal communication? It was back in the day when your office was small enough that people worked within earshot, everyone knew each other (and their significant others), and spontaneous, all-team happy hours were the norm.

When you daydreamed about scaling your company, you envisioned a beautiful new office space, investors begging you for meetings, and team-wide trips to Cancun after crushing your annual revenue goals. But…you never seemed to allocate any of your daydreaming hours to planning new internal processes to support your growth. We get it. It’s a lot more fun to plan a Cancun itinerary than an internal communication strategy; but without this framework in place, you’ll never make it to Mexico.

Don’t worry—we’ve got your back. Growing businesses use the BambooHR® Employee Community to keep their people informed and aligned with the bigger picture. Read on to learn more about how your team can stay just as connected at 150 employees as you did when there were just 25 of you.

But First, What Is Scaling?

Scaling a business involves growing operations to handle higher demand while keeping the costs for additional resources relatively low. In other words, it’s the process of adapting a small-scale business model to reach a larger market, serve more customers, and increase revenue and profit. The goal is to boost production, sales, or services while maintaining or improving efficiency.

It’s challenging to scale a business because several complex and interconnected factors must harmoniously work together—and often under limited resources and shifting market dynamics. For instance, let’s say a company has conducted unbiased research and determined that its product or service would be successful in a bigger market (hooray!). But, can they afford to hire all the talent they’ll need as they grow?

If not, they’ll have to hire fewer high-performers, which could lead to quality suffering at scale, and in turn, poor customer experiences that harm their brand’s reputation. Aside from personnel challenges, it may also cause infrastructure, compliance, and regulatory issues. All in all, successful scaling requires meticulous planning and adaptability to power through those growing pains.

Scaling Up: A Real-World Example

Let’s take King Digital Entertainment. This developer creates free smartphone games and boasts a huge user base, thanks in large part to Candy Crush. From mid-2012 to mid-2013, the company successfully scaled and saw a 12-fold increase in revenue but only a sixfold increase in costs—resulting in a nearly 70-fold increase in operating income, from €10.5 million to €716 million.

Researchers attribute King’s success to the company’s ability to boost revenue while cutting variable unit costs and maintaining fixed costs. Their multifaceted scaling strategy included analyzing and changing their monetization mechanism several times and operating five creative studios simultaneously (as opposed to one, like most entertainment companies) to innovate without losing agility. They also maintained a positive company culture to motivate staff to develop games that delight users.

8 Must-Have Tools for Your Tech Stack

The right tech is crucial to scaling a business successfully, and you’ve likely already invested a lot of time in setting up some great tools for your company. So, make sure everybody is aware of the resources available and how to access them.

Some of these—like payroll—are no-brainers. But it's easy for other things like subscriptions to industry publications to get lost in the chaos.

For all of your HR needs, BambooHR® is a complete platform that puts key tools at your fingertips, including:

• HR Data and Reporting: Don’t guess—make data-driven decisions. With 49 built-in reports, you can strategically improve your people’s experience and the company’s bottom line.
• Applicant Tracking System (ATS): Hire the right people right away by posting customized job openings on popular job boards, leveraging email and offer letter templates, and more.
• Payroll, Time Tracking, and Benefits: By tracking it all in one place, you can say goodbye to data double-entry and hello to accurate paydays.
• Employee Experience and Performance: Set the stage for honest, two-way communication with feedback and sentiment tools to help your people feel more fulfilled at work.

Plus, consider these additional tools to help your employees stay informed and productive in their day-to-day:

• Project management tools, such as Wrike or Asana
• Creative applications, like Adobe Photoshop and video editing software
• Sales-enablement software, such as Salesforce or Intercom
• Memberships to premium publications, like The Wall Street Journal and Harvard Business Review

When sharing these resources with your team, remember to include a link and a description for any process you’ve taken the time to design. Especially for tools used by multiple employees or teams, like your customer relationship management (CRM) software.

Bonus if you can organize your tools by department. Having an easy-to-search central location for all of these tools and processes helps make onboarding new hires easier, faster, and more effective.

17 Marketing and Sales Resources

Your marketing, sales, and business development teams have created awesome collateral and put a lot of thought into your brand voice and style guidelines. When it comes to external assets, consistency is the key to protecting your polished and recognizable brand identity.

Consider making a searchable resource hub where everybody on your team can find the following assets:

Marketing Resources

• Company logo (in all relevant file types and sizes)
• Pictures and screenshots approved for press
• Client logos and testimonials approved for marketing collateral
• Official brand colors
• Font library

Sales Resources

• Company one-pager
• Overview deck
• Price sheets
• Price quote template
• Contract template
• Invoice template
• Letterhead template
• Pitch deck template
• Case studies
• Explainer videos
• Product and service FAQs
• Security and privacy terms

11 Essential HR Policies

By making company policies accessible to employees, you’re freeing up your HR team to focus on more meaningful work instead of answering repetitive questions. But beyond efficiency, your employees will appreciate the freedom to find answers to very personal questions they may not feel comfortable talking about.

Here’s a quick checklist of the policies that should be easy for everyone to find in their employee handbook:

• Benefits overview
• Code of conduct
• Payroll practices
• Parental leave policy
• Holiday schedules
• PTO policies
• Time-off request processes
• Business hours and shift schedules
• Workplace harassment and discrimination policies
• Remote/hybrid work guidelines
• Internet and social media usage policy

6 Tips for Sharing Industry News

While keeping your team up to date on your own company news is a no-brainer, it’s just as important that they stay on top of what's happening within your industry. Keep them informed about things like:

• Competitors and new entrants within your market
• Press about your company, its competitors, and your clients
• Trend reports
• Leadership articles and TED Talks
• Upcoming conferences (especially if you have access to free or discounted tix!)
• Learning and development opportunities, like webinars, Meetups, and specialized classes at General Assembly

5+ Requirements for Your Employee Directory

As you scale and add more superstars to your team, make collaboration easier by providing an employee directory with essential details, such as:

• Profile pictures and names
• Job titles
• Departments
• Contact information
• Location (especially if you have more than one office)

While the following are often considered “nice-to-haves,” adding these personal touches is a simple way to help maintain that tight-knit culture your company had back in the early days:

• Birthdays
• Work anniversaries
• Work history
• Interests
• Languages and skills

Bonus: Don't Forget to Communicate Your Company Vision

Communication about your company’s goals and mission shouldn’t slow down after recruitment. Carving out time for your founders to share important company updates, reinforce their vision, and update everybody on exciting wins and hard challenges is critical for building a strong, connected team.

While all-hands meetings are great, they’re not always practical or 100% inclusive. As a leader, it should be a top priority to ensure you have a line of communication with your whole team beyond in-person meetings.

Not only does this keep everybody on the same page, but it also keeps you accountable and allows new hires to access archived information and gain a better understanding of your company’s journey.

As a best practice, be consistent with this type of communication. Every company culture is unique, so cadence will vary—some founders may find it easiest to send a short message every morning, while others may prefer to share a weekly recap and dashboard. Teams may even host and record monthly town halls.

Tinker around and gather employee feedback to find what internal communications strategy works best for you and your organization.