What happens when your company passes 100 people

It’s time to grow up, and this is where it gets rocky

Congratulations. Whether you are a founder, early employee, or employee #100, this is a big milestone for the company. Some of the most obvious changes at this point are that it will be hard remember everyone’s name and you’ll start having multiple folks with a similar email address. Aside from an awkward moment bumpi ng into someone while getting a snack or accidentally sending your email to eric@company instead of erica@company, there are many more significant challenges you will face, requiring very different management tools and leadership techniques to successfully guide the company through this new phase.

I joined Volta Charging when we had recently closed a series B round of funding and had about 25 people on the team. We’ve since had multiple additional rounds of funding, have sailed past 100 employees and continue to grow. While every fast growing startup is different, there are many similarities in companies that pass this milestone.

What you are experiencing

• You are looking for a playbook…but can’t find one. There is no playbook for where you are. “I’m going to double my headcount in the next three quarters”…there is no playbook for that. There were plenty of books for what to do as a small startup, and lots of advice of what to do if you were running a large public company, but there are few guidebooks that describe how to deal with the issues of rapidly growing a company.
• Employees are getting restless. A flat management structure with limited hierarchical levels and consensus-based decision-making likely isn’t as effective as it once was. The broader team may get stalled because it’s not clear who is responsible for moving a decision forward. Employees crave more feedback and career development than managers in the flat structure have bandwidth (or the ability) to provide.
• Tensions get strained. Multiple factors cone into play here. One is that as you hire more people, the casual, informal “do what it takes” culture which worked so well at less than 40 people becomes chaotic and less effective. Another issue at play is that as you hire a mix of both junior and senior individuals with a mix of small and large company experience you will experience struggles integrating all these new people into the company.
• Processes are breaking. The Doubling Rule of Thumb states that a process will break when the number of users double. Multiple processes across multiples teams are breaking as you cross the 100 employee threshold. This is causing a lot of frustration (see point above).
• Goals are shifting seemingly randomly. The team is growing fast, the business is rapidly evolving, and goals are likely changing fast. This will lead to employee frustration as what might have been a priority last quarter doesn’t seem to be as important now.
• Focus shifts as revenue and unit economics become more important. At the seed stage eyes are on your founder and the team they bring on. Focus at the series A stage is often on getting traction in the market. As you hit the 100 employee mark you have likely moved from Series B to C and the focus has turned to increasing revenue and proving unit economics.

What you need

• Spend extra time ensuring you are developing and maintaining a strong company culture. At the 100th employee mark the company is starting to get set and (for better or worse) getting harder to change. Spend time as a team determining what’s important and get it in writing. Writing about your culture will force you to be both thoughtful and concise in how you describe what you culture is and what you want it to be. Just as important, ensure your leaders ‘live’ the culture and are exemplifying that behavior with every interaction, meeting, and email.
• Instituting process becomes more important than maintaining flexibility. A culture of flexibility and innovation are a big part of how you got to this point, though a team (likely one that is dispersed and has many remote employees) of this size needs structure to continue to grow and be successful. There is no benchmark for this balancing point, but the scale does need to tip towards process and structure.
• Plan for extra employee training — it’s more important now than you think. New processes and more people will lead to many things getting forgotten. Add in new software implementations and you’ll have even more organizational complexity and confusion. Dedicated, consistent, targeted training across the entire team is important. Don’t think of this as taking time away from the team’s ability to do ‘actual work’…training is one of the best investments you will make.
• Change the way you make decisions. While you may have been making decisions based on theories you should shift to making decisions based on data (and if you don’t have the data…start getting it).
• Change the way you think about hiring. Clearly define roles to get past the ‘do whatever it takes’ culture of the first phase of growth. You still want that mindset, but at the same time need more process-driven and experienced folks. Hiring quickly may feel good, though, at this point you have a good size team and can afford to be selective in recruiting and making offers.
• Look for force multipliers. Hiring is important, though you can’t just throw money at problems and expect them to go away. You need to enable one person to have the impact of 10. Force multipliers do that. This could be outsourcing certain activities (and having one person manage the work of 10 contractors, rather than trying to do all that work themselves) or enabling your team with software or other tools. No matter what, you need to find your force multipliers.
• Architect the overall organization. It’s time to revisit the organizational structure. This means figuring out whether the organization’s strategic direction is sound, bringing its structure into alignment with the strategy, and developing the processes and skill bases necessary to realize the strategic intent. You’ll need to find the most important things the company hasn’t hired for yet, be a leader in hiring or delegating to someone in that place, and quickly get them set up for success.
• Develop a deep management bench. You are now starting to have levels of management (an individual contributor reporting to a Manger, to a Director, to a VP), where it used to be much more linear (an individual contributor reporting to an early hire who was a Director or VP). A middle manager isn’t a bad thing — it’s your salvation as the organization grows and you need front line Lieutenants to translate strategy into daily goals and actions.

Enjoy the ride. It will be bumpy, but hugely gratifying.