How To Keep Up With Rapid Company Growth

Company growth is a good thing. It helps establish a stronger brand identity, makes it easier to acquire certain assets, expands opportunities, and drives business performance and profits. Growth does, however, stop being a good thing when you can’t keep up with it. In fact, it is detrimental to a company’s success when this happens. And outgrowing business processes and business infrastructure happens more often than you may think. For this reason, it is important to have procedures in place before you get to the point of outgrowing yourself.

At In Time Tec, the number of our employees have grown by over 250% in the past six years. Here is how we continue to maintain our culture and stay on top of company growth:

Be transparent about reasons for change

There are several operational changes that may be necessary for keeping up with company growth. People that have been with the company from its beginning stages may fight these changes if they aren’t clear on why they are necessary- be sure to be transparent when sharing changes made.

Consider outsourcing

Outsourcing your non-core business allows you to focus on what really matters. We specifically outsource our HR, so we can focus on our business goals. In Time Tec wrote about outsourcing non-core business more in this blog.

Hire the right team 

When hiring, it’s important that you are hiring for more reasons than just being qualified for the job. The candidate should also match the company culture. We ensure this at In Time Tec by conducting three separate interviews: a 30-minute phone screening, a company fit interview, and a technical skills interview.  

Employee Introductions 

Employee introduction slides are emailed out to the company on a new hire’s first day. This slide introduces the new employee, includes a picture of them, and shares more about who they are and what they are up to in life. This makes a difference for our team because it allows us to put a name to the face and have conversation starters when we see the new hire around the office. 

Learn and connect

Learn and Connect is a learning group for new hires (employees who have spent less than one year in the company) to better understand how we work at In Time Tec. The group covers core values and ways of being that create possibilities for individuals, our partners, and the In Time Tec team. Read more about our learning groups here.

Lunch group

This is an opportunity for employees to get to know other people that they don’t generally work on projects with better. We have a “Lunch Group” Zoom channel that specifies the time and location in the office that lunch will be held that day. What better way to bond than over food?

Onboarding process

Everyone reads Tribal Leadership by Dave Logan and John King when they are hired by In Time Tec, so they are familiar with the language we often use. Tribal Leadership is a culture-based management strategy that enables businesses to move employees through the five stages of company mindsets more effectively, transforming them from adequate to outstanding employees. 

New employees are also assigned a “buddy” during their first week that serves as a resource to ask questions to and introduce them to other employees. 

Learning plans

Most engineers are assigned a custom-built learning plan, which outlines the steps they will take in order to come up to speed with the toolset that the partner is using. This helps the company determine who can be assigned to which projects based on where they are in their learning plan.

Make values clear

This is arguably one of the most important ways to ensure that rapid growth does not compromise company culture. Your company values should guide every decision being made within the business. At In Time Tec, we have our values posted on the wall. We wrote more about the importance of defining core values here. 

By implementing the above steps in our company, In Time Tec has been able to maintain our company culture amidst constant growth. No matter how much we grow, we are rooted in our values of trust, transparency, integrity, and leadership.