Every startup dreams of quick and sustainable success. However, achieving significant revenue growth remains a challenge for many entrepreneurs. You have to be constantly willing to adaptexperiment and refine processes.

Recently, our organization, now recognized as one of Inc.'s fastest growing companies. for 2024, celebrated another milestone: in less than six months, we built a high-performing team of over 20 talented individuals from an initial team of just three. the people.

1. The finding of FAIR mentors for problem right now

In 2023, we placed a significant emphasis on growing our network mentors and partners who had already experienced what we were going through at the time and had successfully gotten to where we wanted to be. It has been an invaluable investment in time and money.

As business owners, it can be easy to seek advice from peers within your industry, and sometimes, that advice can be great, but taking advice from someone further along in their business journey is much more invaluable. A simple 20-minute conversation with a mentor can provide the breakthrough needed to resolve an issue you've been struggling with for months or even years.

Finding mentors who excel at your specific issue, not just your business model, is key. We have a PR and branding agency and have never taken advice from other agency owners, but we have taken plenty of advice from other business owners who were highly experienced in the areas of need. For example, we struggled a lot on our sales side, so we used Cole Gordon for mentorship, which helped us set up our sales systems.

Related: How expert mentoring drives startup success

2. Putting yourself on the scale

Whether the goal is to scale or not, to grow, you'll need to systematize your product/service offering and how you execute it on the backend. We used to be an agency that only offered bespoke/tailored offers to clients and executed accounts accordingly.

This created difficulties in the entry of new customers and finding employees who can manage our accounts, preventing our founder and I from stepping away from day-to-day customer fulfillment tasks. During this phase, and even now, we always ask, “Is this solution scalable?” and “Does this solve for now, or solve for a future problem?”

Asking these questions saved us from spending countless hours and money implementing changes that weren't necessary.

Related: 7 Crucial Ways to Scale Your Startup or Business

3. When new employees are hired

As our sales side began to grow tremendously, we faced another problem. Finding talent. We found that new hires took an average of 90 days to understand their role at our firm and work independently, whether they came with experience or not. We faced client rejection to ensure we would succeed with our current client list.

After speaking with a contact in our network, Jeff Sekinger, we discovered that many other businesses faced similar struggles. Jeff solved this problem by investing and building talent ahead of time. Under his leadership, we hired a new employee every week, which changed everything for us.

Hiring someone new every week was initially an expensive investment, but it gave our team time to ramp up and allowed us to triple the number of new customers we could bring in each month. As the team grew rapidly, we promoted several of our existing members into leadership roles, which was a game changer for our team. Trusting them with day-to-day operations, including account success and onboarding and training new hires, freed our Founder and myself to step back and invest our time in other areas of the business that desperately needed our attention.

4. Understanding the true bandwidth capabilities of your teams

Over the last six months, we tried to figure out how much time our team had really share throughout their working day. It was based primarily on each member's perceived bandwidth capabilities rather than actual data. By implementing time tracking software, we could see the true capabilities of our team. It highlighted which customers were taking too long compared to their retention value and identified specific tasks that were taking too long to complete.

We increased some of our client's retainers based on the amount of service they needed from us. This upgrade allowed our team to handle more accounts without compromising their weekly workload. Additionally, we simplified many procedures and tasks to increase efficiency, enabling the team to focus more on executing KPIs than on tedious administrative tasks that weren't really necessary at the end of the day.

Related: Increase employee success with these 3 proven strategies

Over time, the data showed us the true client-to-account executive ratio, which has been invaluable to us in ensuring we can continue to grow as fast as we want.

I'd like to believe that our agency's journey is truly unique in the industry. Beyond simply filling roles and focusing solely on revenue, we paid attention to the culture we were creating along the way. Our goal was to maximize and value the potential and contribution of each team member.

As we aim for continued growth and sustainable success, these processes will remain in place – as they say, “Take care of your people and your people will take care of your business.”