How to Make Your Startup Grow Faster?

Starting a startup is one of the hardest things in the world, and running it so that it reaches its full potential is even harder. The founders who manage it are rarely the ones with the cleverest idea. They are the ones who decided what they were building toward, hired against that decision, asked for outside help before they were drowning, and kept changing how they reach an audience as the company changed shape.

This article covers four moves that make a startup grow faster: setting short- and long-term goals you actually own, hiring the right people at the right moment, leveraging help from advisors outside the company, and keeping your marketing tactics current as the business develops. It reads well alongside our other tips and tricks on starting a business.

Boosting Your Startup in the Right Way

This is true for millions of entrepreneurs around the world who are constantly looking for new ideas and techniques that will help them grow their startup and turn it into a venture they have always dreamed of. Boosting your startup is hard but doable, and the founders who do it are not working from better instincts. They are working from written goals, a hiring bar they refuse to drop, and a marketing channel they can actually measure.

It is worth knowing what the odds actually look like before you plan against them. About half of new establishments are still operating five years after they start, and roughly one in five is still operating after twenty years.

Those survival rates come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics establishment survival series, and they are a useful corrective to both panic and overconfidence. Most startups do not fail in the first year. They stall somewhere in the middle, usually because nobody wrote down what the company was supposed to be doing next.

Set Your Short- and Long-Term Goals

One of the biggest mistakes tons of entrepreneurs make when starting their businesses is not defining what they are trying to achieve in life. Yes, they are all trying to make money and take their business to a new level, but what else are you trying to do? Our notes on a first entrepreneurial project cover the same ground from the other direction.

Are you into penetrating a new market? Would you like to change the world? Are you passionate about reaching as many new people as possible, or prefer getting new business partners and investors as often as possible?

These are just some of the most popular short- and long-term goals out there, but that does not mean they are your goals too. Instead of using other people’s goals, you need to set your own goals and stick to your ideas and desires. As soon as you define these goals, you will start working towards turning them into reality, and that is the best way to grow your startup.

A goal that survives contact with a busy week has four parts: the outcome you want, the measure that tells you whether you got it, the person who owns it, and the date you will review it. A short-term version reads like this: sign ten paying customers in the next quarter, measured by signed contracts, owned by the founder running sales, reviewed on the last working day of the quarter. A long-term version reads like this: become the default option for one specific customer segment, measured by the share of inbound enquiries naming us first, owned by the whole leadership group, reviewed twice a year. If a goal has no owner and no review date, it is a preference rather than a goal.

Goals also decide what you refuse. A small company can usually carry one long-term goal and two or three short-term goals that feed it, because every extra goal competes for the same people and the same week. A startup business plan is the place to record which ones survived that cut.

Hire the Right People

Lots of startups start small and employ just a couple of people that are also the founders too. This arrangement might work for a while, at least until your startup starts gaining more attention, but this is not a sustainable setup for the future.

As your workload starts rising, your ability to handle everything on your own will start declining, which is why you need to employ a few more people. Doing this does not sound like the hardest thing in the world, but if you insist on recruiting great candidates and hiring only the best people you can find, your hiring process might take a while.

The signal that it is time to hire is not revenue. It is the work that keeps getting dropped. Track for two or three weeks which tasks slip past their deadline and whose desk they belong to, and the shape of the first role usually writes itself. Hiring before that pattern is visible tends to produce a job nobody can describe.

Once you know the role, run it the same way every time: a written role description, a scorecard of three to five competencies the person must have, a structured interview where every candidate is asked the same questions in the same order, and reference calls you actually make. The scorecard is what stops a likeable candidate from beating a capable one. Make sure your new staff is as professional and experienced as possible, but do not forget that these people need to find your short- and long-term goals credible and work on achieving them as well.

Hiring well is also how a small company stops being fragile. Small businesses make up 99.9 percent of United States firms and employ 45.9 percent of American workers.

That figure is published by the Small Business Administration Office of Advocacy. The companies in that group that keep growing are almost never the ones who postponed their first hires until the founders burned out.

Leverage Help from Others

Again, doing everything on your own might sound like a great deal at first, but it is not. And if your staff is not enough to make your startup as successful as you would like it to be, you need to start figuring out new ideas and thinking outside the box.

This is why startups often get some outside help and hire professional advisors who can help you make all your dreams come true, so do not be afraid to do that as well. From financial advisors to innovation consulting professionals who will help you introduce new ideas into your startup, the useful ones come from the same few places: the investors already on your cap table, the founders one stage ahead of you, your accountant’s client list, and the trade body for your sector.

Scope the engagement before it starts. Write down the problem being solved, the length of the engagement, what the advisor will hand over at the end, and how both sides will judge whether it worked. Open-ended advisory arrangements are the ones that quietly continue for a year without producing anything. Put the scope in writing even when the advisor is a friend, because that is the case where nobody wants to raise it later.

Good advisors also catch the failure you cannot see from inside. Running out of capital is the most commonly cited reason startups shut down, named in 70 percent of the post mortems, while poor product market fit sits behind it at 43 percent.

That breakdown comes from the CB Insights startup failure research, and the ordering matters. Cash is usually the final cause of death rather than the root problem, so an advisor who only reviews your runway is reviewing the symptom.

Keep Working on Your Marketing Tactics

Another massive mistake lots of startups make is not focusing on their marketing as much as they should. Marketing a small startup is not the same as marketing a huge company, and as your business develops, your marketing techniques need to update as well.

Finding the right marketing idea is hard at first, but once you realize what your audience is responding to, you will not have a problem defining your primary marketing approach. And if you manage to find ideas that are not expensive and cost you nothing but time, such as hosting a webinar, claiming a hashtag, and blogging regularly, you will be able to benefit from that more than you can imagine.

The loop that turns those tactics into growth is simple enough to run on a whiteboard:

• Pick one channel, not four, and decide the measure before you start.
• Run it for a fixed period long enough to produce a real signal.
• Record what the audience actually responded to, in writing.
• Decide to keep the channel, change it, or cut it, then pick the next one.

A tactic that costs nothing but time still spends the most expensive thing a small team owns. If nobody recorded the result, the tactic did not produce a decision, and an undecided tactic gets repeated forever.

Make Your Startup Grow Faster

Growing your startup takes a lot of time, no matter what you do, where you are located, and how many people you employ. So be patient, and understand that the growth comes from the reviews repeating, not from any single quarter going well. Once the goals, the hiring bar, the advisors and the marketing loop are all running on a schedule, you just have to keep up the good work and keep introducing useful changes that will make your startup more and more successful in the future.

If you want the operating documents behind that schedule, our guidance on sustainable business growth and on scaling a startup business is the natural next read.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many goals should a startup set at one time?

Fewer than most founders want to. A small company can usually carry one long-term goal and two or three short-term goals that feed it, because every additional goal competes for the same people and the same week. If a goal has no owner and no review date, it is a preference rather than a goal.

When is the right time to make the first hire?

The signal is not revenue, it is the work that is consistently being dropped. Track for two or three weeks which tasks slip past their deadline and who they belong to, and the shape of the first role usually writes itself. Hiring before that pattern is visible tends to produce a role nobody can describe.

What should a startup agree with an advisor before starting?

The problem being solved, the length of the engagement, what the advisor will hand over, and how both sides will judge whether it worked. Open-ended advisory arrangements are the ones that quietly continue without producing anything. Put the scope in writing even when the advisor is a friend.

How do you know whether a marketing tactic is working?

Decide the measure before the tactic starts, run it long enough to gather a real signal, and compare it against the channel you are already running. A tactic that costs nothing but time still costs the most expensive thing a small team has. If nobody recorded the result, the tactic did not produce a decision.