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40 Things Every Startup Should Do To Scale Up

By: Meha Agarwal | via Inc42.com
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For any entrepreneur, to implement and execute at the idea stage is quite difficult. However, it becomes more harder, when he tries to scale up things and move up with the growth graph.

This happens because initially it was only you who was at the core of your company. But as you grow, it more becomes a team work. There are numerous examples of startups which take off with great gusto, but ended up abruptly, failing to sustain a continuous growth graph.

The reasons for this could be many – lack of funds, market instability, weaker strategies, wrong timing – the list is endless.

Here are 40 pointers from the book ‘Scaling Up’ by Verne Harnish. Verne C. Harnish founded the Young Entrepreneurs’ Organization (YEO), now known as Entrepreneurs’ Organization. He is an author, often writing as the “Growth Guy”. Some of his published books include Mastering the Rockefeller Habits and Fortune: The greatest business decisions of All Time.

  1. Hire fewer people but pay them more.
  2. No team is so big that it can’t be fed with two pizzas.
  3. If more than one person is accountable, then no one is accountable, and that’s when things start falling through the cracks.
  4. Hire people who don’t need to be managed, and regularly wow the team with their insights and outputs.
  5. Leaders must hire people who are better than them.
  6. Heads of Business Units need to lead as if they are individual CEO’s.
  7. Use the Lean technique – Eliminate time wasted on activities that don’t add value for customers/clients.
  8. The cost of bad hire is 15x his or her salary (according to TopGrading).
  9. You need strange culture and strange strategy to differentiate your firm in the marketplace.
  10. It’s better to do 3-4 hours of interview instead of spending hundreds of hours of headaches if you hire the wrong person.

Want to read pointers 11-40? Click here: https://inc42.com/resources/40-things-every-startup-scale/