Managing Growth

Maybe it is too early to talk about managing growth for a young company. After all, we are barely starting up, and still in the process of getting things in order. We are still working from a room in my house and haven’t even got a proper office yet. But, it is something worth while talking about as it is something that can make or break your success as a start-up.

As a young web development company, which is barely turning profitable, we are lucky to get our hands on any projects. I mean you say yes to any work that comes your way. The phobia of not landing enough work, and the approach you take towards it, if successful, can leave you cornered against a pile of work and run the risk of not being able to deliver most of them on time! Guess what, we are already there.

It certainly is a good problem to have, a problem that you can should consider yourself lucky to have. But nevertheless it is still a problem. And the approach you take to solve the problem will play a key role in determining the success of the company.

As for us, we decided that it is the quality that matters over quantity. Therefore, we decided that it is time that we put a hold to new sales and concentrate on delivering the existing projects and do a proper job of delighting the customers and exceeding their expectations. This, for us, is far more important than blind growth. We want our customers to be happy with us. We want them to come back to us without hesitation. Once we win a customer, we want to be able to build a long term relationship with them.

We do build great relationships with our customers. We put is a great effort in understanding and identifying their requirements and where they are coming from. We then propose a solution that most of the time exceeds their expectations. We have a great start. Then we start the journey of execution.

This is where we make a few mistakes. To be honest, our QA function can improve heaps. Not having a dedicated QA is also one of the reason. But generally our team is overbooked. And this leaves very little time for testing. We have to make progress on many projects on any given day. And personally I am responsible to review each developers work prior to them going through to the customers and I have not been doing a proper job of it.

Sop now we have made a decision that all of that is going to change. We are going to make time to do a proper job. With the team growing in size this will result in a decrease for the workload for each developer.

Secondly, we are not going to take up any new projects for a couple of months. We are going to solely concentrate on the current projects. we are going to tie the loose ends and make them proper. Now that should make our customers happy.