Spaces not faces. How to design your start-up organisation

Launching a start-up is an exciting time. Before you know it your headcount has doubled then tripled. If successful you’ll soon find yourself launching internationally and setting up your own internal talent team.

But how do you design your team in the early days and what do you need to think about during expansion?

In the early days think carefully before hiring anyone.

It’s true that you’ll need to hire in order to expand and take on new tasks and handle new business activities. Some roles need to be hired from the beginning while others can be on-boarded as and when tasks begin to surface and build up.

The key thing to avoid is the dreaded ‘desk tapping’. This is the situation where you hire employees who aren’t fully utilised from day 1. Many start-up failures can be traced back to over zealous hiring and expensive and inefficient headcount.

A good way to start at the very beginning is to identify the core roles you need. The best way to do this is to follow these basic steps:

1. Needs > 2. Roles > 3. People

From day one it’s important to think spaces and not faces. That way you can prevent the desire to hire friends who might not be suitable in the long term.

By starting with needs you start to think about things like:

1. Define product requirements and GTM strategy
2. Design our product
3. Build our product
4. On-board users
5. Forecast revenue and build reports

You then pivot to think about the types of roles you might need:

1. Define produce requirements & GTM strategy > Product Manager
2. Design our product > UX heavyweight
3. Build our product > Developer (Back-end and Front-end)
4. On-board users > Customer Campaign & Acquisition Manager
5. Forecast revenue and build reports > Financial Planning Manager

A simple tabletop exercise is enough to get started

Remember that in the early days you might want to double up on roles to keep headcount costs to a minimum. In previous projects we have pulled together UX and content into the same role only to separate them as the business scaled.

If your start-up is attached to a larger mothership i.e. corporate company holding the pursestrings, then consider how you might leverage existing roles to keep costs low. This could mean leveraging existing finance, HR and legal resources from the mothership’s shared services function.

But what happens once you start to scale?

Once you get the wind behind you you’ll need to start planning further ahead. If in the early days you had 1 customer support agent you’ll no doubt need to plan for a team of agents. If you’re expanding internationally you’ll need to scope hiring across multiple countries with all the challenges that entails.

A good way to get ahead of this is to hire a talent lead who is responsible for planning recruitment needs into the future. They can work with your leadership team to assess how single people might evolve into teams in the future. In some cases they can help predict the type of teams you’ll need many months and years from now. On my current project we already have an idea that we will need to build a safety team once we go to scale.

If you are reading this and hiring for scale then you’re in a good place. Just follow this basic advice and your headcount shouldn’t give you a headache.

Good luck!