Growth as a process hack

Companies in its early years, has 2 main objectives - to grow and to grow profitably (in this order of priority unless it's a boot strapped startup which 97% of the early stage companies are).

Growth of any company will mainly depend on the 5Ps of marketing - Product, Pricing, Place, Promotion and People. While all the aspects are crucial for success in early growth stage, I want to focus on the people aspect here and establish by way to empirical observation that growth can be ascertained by way of a process setting your company culture and organisation.

In order to succeed, it's important to "start with why" (in his book by Simon Sinek). So who has the 'why' - it's usually the founding member who shares a common vision for "why" of the company. So the duty of the founders or the CEO is to propagate the message of "why" to his immediate juniors who in turn propagate it further down. E.g. Why does a payments bank exist? Let's say, for first timers making payments easy, efficient and effective. So if the "why" == easy payments, then trying to make it anything else - like cross-sell platform will be a satellite activity (to be undertaken at a more mature stage).

Next important aspect is to answer the question - "How". In order to answer "How" - the company may identify a list of 3-4 critical activities that it has to do, in order to realise its "why". Now these 3-4 critical activities may be dependent or independent. In the early days, creating a totally independent unit may go against the culture of "why", so it's advisable to create a common horizontal structure encompassing all these 3-4 activities. E.g. For a payments bank, in order to ease payments, it may have to work on a seamless user experience, building its presence across ecosystem (merchants, retailers) and creating value proposition in the users' payment life cycle. All these activities can be driven by a Chief Product Officer who has access to teams of business and product people. I believe that a CPO is a better choice as an early stage startup success is defined by the very "what" of the organisation.

The final ingredient for success is defining the "what" of the company. Now that the "how" has been established clearly with a captain at the helm, he needs to choose his team wisely. Most of the time, "what" is taken care by the technology and operations team. While having a central IT and Ops team is an efficient idea, a strong Project Management team is equally important to make sure that things move in the right direction with right pace. Tech teams tend to group by skills which is a natural choice but critical skills in critical paths need to be identified and proportioned for.

In summary, the early stage growth company needs to look like an inverted cone. In this structure, if the "why" of the organisation is viable, then the whole company will prosper. I also want to add that no "why" is worthless. Sure, there is value in anything that you build (reasonably well). But between a billion $ company and a million $ company, it's the basic "why" which differentiates.