Your Startup Is Growing

Your company is in the Wild West phase. You’re moving fast and breaking things.

The idea of documenting something is laughable. Your process changes daily and you’re the only person doing this work anyway.

Then things start to change…

• You can’t list every customer off the top of your head.
• You hire a few sales people.
• Someone wants to take a vacation but the business can’t run without them.
• Teams are figuring out how to work together more efficiently.
• You notice the repetitive manual tasks slowing you down.

You start wondering, “Is now the time to start documenting stuff? Maybe define a workflow or add a Zapier integration?”

Speed is your competitive advantage. You want to stay lean and nimble. But also, stuff is starting to break.

How do you know when it’s time to add structure, playbooks, automation, tools or guidelines??

6 Signs It’s Time To Build Internal Processes

1. Things are falling through the cracks. A lot.

One customer renewal overlooked, no problem. Two or three? → Okay, let’s add a weekly email report.

Forget to send invites to an event? → Time for a checklist.

The dollar amount is wrong on a contract because of a manual error…for the third time this month.  → Do we upgrade our e-sign tool to get pricing configurations?

2. New hires are confused or slow to ramp up.

You’ve added several new hires who aren’t “getting it.”

What resources are available to them to understand the company, job, tasks, or internal quirks? Do you have recordings of a product demo, a plan for call shadowing, and some documentation about how to use the CRM?

You don’t need an LMS on day one. Start simple and build it out over time.

3. You’re playing referee.

I love to get in the middle of employee conflict

…said no CEO ever

It usually happens first in sales because commissions are at stake and sales folks, by definition, are great at making the ask and pushing boundaries.

• “They took my lead.”
• “Do I get more commission because of the multiyear contract?”

It’ll overflow into a fun game of “Whose job is it anyway?”

• “Customer Success sends customer newsletters.”

• “No, that’s Marketing’s job.”

Clarifying roles or putting rules of engagement on (digital) paper will help alleviate this. Creating technology-enabled guardrails with in-app automation or user permissions is phase two.

4. It takes longer to explain than to operationalize.  

You realize it’s quicker to put instructions in a Google Doc than to sit down for a 30 minute walk through of <insert your fave startup workflow here>.

If you’re an engineer, you’d rather write a script or create a widget than do that manual data pull again.

5. You get the same question multiple times per day, week, month.

Ask me once, it’s a one off. Ask me twice, I notice. Ask me three times, I’ll answer you with a canned response or link to doc. Ask me twenty times, I’ll spend money or time on a longer term fix.

6. You forget the process yourself.

Things are changing fast and getting more complex. What are all the steps to send a customer email again? Do you pull the list from the CRM or the Marketing Automation tool?

You designed the workflow but can’t remember it. Whomp whomp! It’s only happened to me 100x. Time to document, automate, or both.

The Balancing Act

It’s a common and important question - when is the right time to add internal process?

Add too much, it will slow you down, create unnecessary expenses, and be out-of-date before it’s done.

Add too little, your customers, employees, and growth trajectory will pay the price.

It’s a delicate balance that you’ll continually refine. Look for the signs and adjust as you go.

Growing pains are a fantastic “problem” to have! 🚀