Upscale: What it takes to scale a startup. By the people who've done it.

the transition from a tight-knit group of multi-tasking entrepreneurs and early hires with a ‘Vision’, to dozens if not hundreds of team-members, often in multiple offices around the world.

why,’ she says. ‘If you don’t know why you are doing something and you don’t know why it contributes to the team goals and the company goals, then it’s probably not a good idea to start doing the task until you do understand the context and why it’s important. Because there’s never a shortage of things to do in a startup.’

From ramping up their infrastructure and processes so that they’re able to hire at least a person-a-week to building a product or service that works across multiple markets and languages, to fretting about company culture and values which can easily get watered down or even lost as a startup goes into hyper-growth mode, scaling a business can be a

Marsh’s wry smile was one of recognition. ‘The only way to retain really good people is to promote them just a tiny bit faster than you feel comfortable with,’ he replied. ‘And you can, by the way, develop people at an astonishing rate if they’re really good and really engaged… ‘But when people are possessed, shall we way, of an irrational faith in

‘Grove famously said that about a third of the people he hires are great: they transform the function they’re in charge of, they inspire brilliant people and make his business fundamentally better,’ summarised Marsh. Another third are OK. They don’t really do much harm, or much good. And about a third are a disaster, and if he didn’t get rid of the

Marsh’s second step is to test the candidate’s true motivation.

‘Even at the earliest stages of a company’s development, the most important thing in establishing a strong culture is the leadership team constantly demonstrating those values through their own behaviours.

‘When you start out, it’s basically the behaviours and how the founders and the original employees treat each other which define the culture. But when you get to some scale, you need at least an articulation of what the values of the company are.’

‘I like to say if brand is the promise to a customer, then culture is how you deliver on that promise.

‘reference the heck out of them’. That encompasses both formal referencing through a headhunter, but also informal referencing through back channels, he says.