ScalingUp Playbook - Scaling your Human Capital: The Science & the Art of going from Seed to Series A to Series E & beyond

A frequent query that I come across from many Founders & CXO's, how do we scale up human capital smoothly from Seed to Series A to Series E (& beyond)? Each stage has its nuances with multiple areas to focus on. Imperative that it takes a significant quantum of Leadership's bandwidth, one has to manage the pace to suit to today's context + tomorrow's realities, plying progressively towards the next one.

Is there a playbook outlining critical things one can focus on in the journey from 0 - 100? Infact, more often than not Founders / CXOs have come back expressing that I wish I had focussed on this part much earlier & with more focus. While that realization is absolutely authentic, but more often than not scaling up can be one of the reasons why high-growth setups underachieve.

Having served at the helm of multiple high-growth setups, scaling their human capital to the next level in their respective journeys, I must admit that scaling up human capital is a mix of science & art, where one is always balancing between delivering today's priorities & building for tomorrow's realities, and hence as a Scaleup HR specialist, I have tried to create a playbook (of sorts), rendering scaling up as a process & practice - something which can be replicated to ensure all 3 critical aspects:

a) creating incremental business value with minimal friction,

b) driving sustainability & scalability to value creation &

c) lastly, unlocking the potential of human capital.

In addition to this playbook, there is a Scaleup Meter, a tool to enable Founders / CXO's, in identifying their current stage & gaps to work on, to get smoothly to the next stage.

Yes, I can relate with the growth journey & pain points mentioned in the Scaling Up playbook, but what next?

a) Take the ScaleUp Meter to understand how your organization is shaped on critical areas

b) Basis the score, the ScaleUp meter would recommend improvement areas for the gaps + Focus areas referenced in the Playbook are action items for deployment. Execution is the key here. Go ahead & start building things accordingly.

c) Given the unique context & situation one is in, the priority of execution always changes - If you want to put a prioritizations & roadmap to executing the improvement areas, we can chat here: Connect over Chat

d) If you want additional help with execution as well, we can chat here: Connect over Chat

Few things to keep in mind are:

a) Cos my experiences have been heavy on Product - tech & SaaS setups, a lot of taxonomy comes from that side of the world, however, scaling up human capital is fairly domain-agnostic, as long as one wants to strike a good balance between all 3 parameters highlighted above.

b) The playbook consists of 4 Stages (0 - 1 Seed, 1 - 10 Traction, 10 - 50 Growth & 50-100 Scale up). These stages are not reflective of either the funding stages (Preseed, Seed, Series A to E etc), nor of the size of the company. As one would notice post going through them, the Stages are more indicative of the operational state & few key characteristics are definitive of respective stages.

c) The playbook is purely anecdotal, drawn from personal success stories (& lot of learnings & realizations), not prescriptive, but at the same time, have seen tremendous value getting created while executing as per it.

d) The playbook assumes that 0 - 1 of the journey has happened, meaning the Product market fit has been figured out & now, it's all about scaling up the delivery with an evolutionary path to follow.

e) The points listed are not in specific order of ranking/importance (& not limited to it). The priority of execution of Focus areas depends on context, Org priorities & envisaged end state.

f) The Scaleup playbook attempts to cover all the critical areas - Getting noticed by Right & Best candidates, Onboarding, Retention, Alignment, Goal Setting & Performance Management, Capability & Workforce planning, Productivity & Performance, Growth & Development, Organizational Effectiveness (Structure, RnRs, Role Clarity, Automation & Systems etc), Best Practices & Competitor Mapping.

Stage 1 - 10, Seed

Critical Features of this stage

• Getting from 0-1 & 1-10 is the key focus on most of things (Feature building). Firefighting might equally entail a good amount of bandwidth
• Critical changes in scope happening frequently
• Resources are perpetually in scarcity.
• Core Team is getting identified & build.
• New Joiner Onboarding is no longer automatic - Letting new people find their own way does not work anymore.

Focus on:

• Building clear fundamental frameworks - Vision, Mission, Purpose, Problem statement focused on, The Why of the Company/Product. The Core team should have this completely embedded to it
• Driving clarity with core members & key people on strategy, roles & responsibilities, structure & possibly, operational metrics - all of it aligning with critical business constructs
• Ensuring the operational structure, metrics & performance expectations (or at least a Northstar metric) are clear at a functional level
• Setting up a strong cohesive bond within the Core team with all the above pointers.
• Defining the business criticals (value proposition, target market, strategy etc. even though it might be experimentative or work in progress), visualizing key functions to drive effectiveness & mapping core people to key functions
• Building clarity on constructs of recruitment for inducting core team, key people & others are clear. (For example, For Core team, it can be trust, alignment to Vision & Problem statement, similarly for Key people, it can be Capability driven etc.),
• Critical - Check on Speed of Decision making, Speed of Execution, Speed of Information Sharing, Rate of Collaboration & Quality of Output

To access progressive stages: 10 - 50 (Traction, 50 - 100 (Growth), & 100+ (ScaleUp), please fill up the form below & you would get full access within 24 hours (usually instantly) in your mail.