When I joined Weekdone as employee number 5 we had no big plans to grow. We were playing it safe, only hiring new people when we had the revenue to pay for them. We didn’t raise millions of dollars to make great big marketing plans. And while this gave us a great job security, it also meant that no one was thinking about what to do when we start growing fast.
Be ready to succeed.
No founder starts a company without hoping it will grow into a great success story. Even when your aim is to just run a 3-people team, somewhere in your mind is the hope it will become the next Google or Facebook. Or Microsoft. Or at least Instagram.
Yet when setting goals for their company, people tend to get scared and set mediocre goals. You are afraid to think big. The logic behind is sound: the higher your goals, the lower your chance of success. And you don’t want to be a failure, don’t you.
This is wrong. If even a small part of you wants to build a huge company to dominate the marketplace, you need to think big. It is better to achieve 50% of a goal like “Conquer the world” than 100% of “rule a village”.
Thinking big.
The main reason you fail to think big is the fear of failure. It is understandable. Failure sounds scary. Especially to people starting their first company. However it actually is better to fail than to not try at all.
Luckily, if you are doing well, you will overcome this fear. You will start thinking about more ambitious goals. So, even if you are thinking or running a small business now, that might not b the case in a year.
That is why you need a scalable company culture and internal processes from day one. Better to be safe than sorry, right?
What is growth?
According to Fortune magazine, scaling means growing your revenues faster than your operational costs. If you ever want to grow fast, you need to take this into account from the get-go. You can easily do it with a goal setting system like Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). Thanks to OKRs, it is easy to expand your teams and quickly bring new employees on board. They can very quickly see what we are doing and what you are expecting of them. And it makes it so much easier to understand who is the right fit for your growing team.
Build success into your core.
In Weekdone, we started growing fast. Luckily for us, we had been using Objectives and Key Results goal setting for years. As Weekdone is the best tool for using the OKR system. According to Scott Wolfe Jr., CEO of zlien: “Weekdone as a tool offers instant high-level visibility and information on what is going on with your company objectives.”
If you haven’t yet, you should seriously rethink your goals to make sure they are both ambitious and inspiring. And will help you grow. You can easily do that while setting your team’s first OKRs in Weekdone.