Your people are your product

Growth. The desire and outcome of any successful business. If you want to add more features or billable hours, the most significant variable in the formula is headcount. Add twofold developers, and your software will launch two times as fast. Double the number of people in your organisation, and your profits will double in a year.

But honestly, none of the above is true. Even if we could forget about all management and overhead necessary to pull linear growth off, solely looking at an increase in the number of people will reduce your effectiveness. The people in your organisation build the product but are also the product of what you build. Simply stated, the output of your organisation is either the positive or negative result of the culture, knowledge, effectiveness and motivation of your workforce.

Inertia
/ɪˈnəːʃə/

1. a tendency to do nothing or to remain unchanged.
2. (PHYSICS) a property of matter by which it continues in its existing state.

Start building your organisation together with your people

The psyche and culture within a workforce dilute quickly and are subject to inertia. These two properties make it very difficult to change the culture within an organisation. It also makes it very challenging to grow in numbers rapidly and successfully.

When you start adding too many people in a short period, you're diluting your teams' original culture and character. Growing back substance and harmony is an investment and effort which can't be done through management; it has to be done by the people themselves (read: potential drop in morale and effectiveness). With leadership mostly busy onboarding people on new projects, one-on-one time drops between your teams and managers, and people start to feel abandoned. What you add at the top starts flowing away from the bottom.

The people you have in your organisation got you this far and can get you further with a little help. Before you start scaling horizontally, start scaling vertically first. Build an understanding with your people on where you want to go, the business needs, and where the bottlenecks are. Offer the right tools and processes to support the capabilities of your employees and make them flourish as much as possible. And if necessary, translate their needs into new hires.

Growth should be qualitative, not quantitive. Make everyone in your organisation part of your grow-strategy, hire for cultural fit and start building your organisation with your people. Better margins don't only come from room in your budget but also from the headspace in your teams.