Once we hit 15 employees, a lot of stuff that happened automatically before wasn't so automatic. We moved into a larger office and communication started to get confused. Seemingly simple sales and marketing messages all went through a disastrous game of phone tag. Lots of simple things were added to help communication: cross department meetings, monthly strategy sessions, public calendar scheduling, etc. All routine things for most businesses. But they weren't routine for us, they were revolutionary.
As we start getting a little more corporate how do we make sure to stay true to our roots? More importantly, how do we make sure we all know what our roots are when we can't even get our simple signals straight? So, we created a mission statement and core values. It can be really hard to make decisions of a moral nature in a company because each person in the company has a different value system. But the process of talking through our common beliefs in the context of a profit generating business actually helped us gel together as a team.
Of course, there are other ways to keep the team tight. My next tool for managing a high growth team:
Tool #6 Rock Band. Ain't nothing like playing some classic rock and drinkin' a PBR to bring a group of people together. Sure, sure, we got a little carried away. In fact, we are still waiting for some other group to put up a decent challenge to our rock band supremacy. You can all go pound salt. We rock.
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