Building a Future-Proof team
Eight essential tips
How do you build a rock-solid, future-proof team as a rapidly growing scale-up? Marble Myrna shares eight essential tips.
Your scale-up is growing fast, and the workload is overwhelming. How do you tackle it?
“Not by working harder, as I see many scale-ups doing,” says Marble’s Myrna. “Especially when it’s busy, you need to make time to future-proof your processes and team.”
Here’s how.
1. Hire for attitude, train for skills
‘In a scale-up, things change constantly. That requires people with the right mindset. You want someone who is flexible, forward-thinking, dedicated, and has a high capacity to learn. If that attitude is there, the skills are generally teachable. The reverse is more complicated.’
2. Choose analytical ability for junior positions
‘Dare to choose highly educated individuals for junior positions, so they not only handle their role operationally but also have the analytical ability to elevate processes. A common issue is the boredom experienced by highly educated individuals in junior roles. You can prevent this by diversifying these positions and combining basic tasks with more challenging projects.’
3. Run and change
‘In a rapidly growing scale-up, a vicious circle often emerges: because processes are creaking, everyone is busy, and because everyone is so busy, nobody finds time to improve those processes. You can break this cycle with the run and change method. Take a moment in a weekly meeting to focus on run activities (daily operations) and change activities (change projects). One week you address your change activities, the next you might not – but by monitoring them, you make more conscious choices.’
4. Create a feedback loop
‘During process changes, things inevitably go wrong. That’s unavoidable. Foster a mindset within the team that prioritizes reflection, so everyone becomes accustomed to not only solving a mistake but also thinking about how it occurred and how it can be prevented. Such a feedback loop may take time in the short term but yields significant benefits in the long term.’
‘Change becomes easier when you take small steps, so you remain flexible and can adjust quickly.
Small steps, big changes.’
5. Change doesn’t happen all at once
‘At the same time, don’t expect to get everything right with one implemented change. You need to fine-tune a change – keep gathering feedback and fine-tuning. Change becomes easier when you take small steps, so you remain flexible and can adjust quickly.
Small steps, big changes.’
6. Structure and centralize your traffic
‘In a scale-up, communication often becomes uncontrolled, with messages coming through various channels like apps, emails, and Slack. If you don’t structure this, everything comes in at once, and you can’t focus on your work. Centralize your traffic so you can address it at set times and decide when you’ll step out of your productive bubble.’
7. Work with accountability
‘Assign one person responsible for each project. This has been a game–changer for Marble. It’s empowering, ensures everyone has something to invest themselves in, and prevents the assumption within a team that someone else will take care of something, ultimately leading to no one doing it.’
8. Keep it fun
‘As the Head of Finance at Ace & Tate, I learned: keep laughing together, especially when pressure is high. If there was an urgent payment to be made, we’d play the Rocky theme. During interviews, we’d ask about someone’s favorite sauce. Maintaining a cheerful atmosphere keeps your company human – after all, you’re not in the business of saving lives. Also important: don’t just focus on what needs to be done but also celebrate what has already been achieved.
Celebrate those successes!’
Myrna’s journey
After working in audit for 10 years at Deloitte and EY, where I learned many best practices, I joined Ace & Tate. At that time, they were rapidly expanding. I started as Head of Finance. It sounded cool, but there was no team. And so the adventure began!
Finding the right people, training the team, and meanwhile ensuring that things didn’t get out of hand. In the initial phase, it wasn’t about smoothly running processes, more about keeping our heads above water. There was a lot of work, and it wasn’t going smoothly yet. Looking back, that’s where I learned the most.
What made it challenging was that we lacked resources and expertise in the one-person team, so I had to solve that first. This also meant that I played a big role in executing operational tasks.
When we started hiring good team members, the next challenge arose. There was more time pressure due to the training and onboarding period. After a short time, we began to turn things around and made real improvements. Yes!
What we spent a long time on was correcting old figures and rectifying mistakes and backlogs made in the past. With an audit looming, we had to accelerate our ‘clean-up’ projects.
I remember the feeling of victory when we finally had a good closure and review of the figures. Previously, other teams would ask us questions about the numbers and whether they were correct, and sometimes there were still errors. But the roles were reversed, and now it was our turn to ask other teams questions about their performance reflected in the figures.
Accounting errors, intercompany accounts, lots of manual steps, and late payments. Those were behind us. We had control! Ready to truly add value to the company and take our game to the next level. After two years, we had a team of 10 people working seamlessly together.
After Ace & Tate, I did some freelance work, helping startups build their processes and get through an audit. I became more and more passionate about this and realized that I needed a team to make a bigger impact and help more companies. That’s when I met Marfred, with a similar vision, and we founded Marble.
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