How to Scale Your Team on A Budget

It’s one thing to recognize that your organization needs to do more—get more clients, spend more advertising dollars, fix more software bugs, create more ad campaigns. It’s another thing to organize the teams that make it possible to achieve these goals. If this seems like a lot for one person to figure out with a single Google search, well, you’re right. It takes a concerted effort from everyone in the leadership team to decide on a direction and hash out the details. But without this preparation, your team expansion can become a serious long-term liability.

Prepare for Scaling

When you anticipate growth periods, the best thing you can do is to prepare ahead of time. Easier said than done of course. Between organizing your company assets to streamlining your business campaign’s execution, there’s a lot to think about. Luckily, we have a few considerations to help you on this journey.

A survey done by HubSpot for executives reported an all too common complaint when it comes to scaling: Securing enough budget to meet the company’s needs.

When you’re experiencing this, it likely means you’re stretching your team and your budget to service your existing client base, sales teams, and marketing efforts while also having to scale rapidly to handle new accounts.

What Does It Mean to Scale a Team?

The best-case scenario for companies when scaling a team happens when revenue increases without team expenses being raised. For example, if you have a 40% increase in revenue but have to hire five new employees that cost 20% of your profit, your team is not being scaled effectively. It’s a common misconception that scaling a team just means increasing the number of your employees, but it’s far from the truth.

Why is this such a prevalent problem? When it comes down to the pressure to improve performance, it can be tempting to use hiring quantity as a façade of success. But hiring isn’t like flipping a switch and starting full-scale production. This hiring investment includes the cost of hiring, as well as the working hours that current employees spend training new employees. Unhealthy and premature turnover means a huge loss of assets and resources.

Instead of covering long-term uncertainty with a quick solution, spend time determining how your organization’s vision, values, and culture will operate on a new team.

Also Read: Can You Really Save Costs by Outsourcing?

Scaling Team with Purpose and Growth

Scaling a team isn’t a one-size-fits-all process. Before you can succeed at scaling up a team, you need to identify the reason you need additional people on that team. Do you have a fully functioning department with excellent leadership and need more people to increase the capacity? Or are you expanding into unfamiliar territory, and you need a team with skills and insights that your organization doesn’t have? In some cases, it’s a little bit of both.

If your organization’s vision is what you want to accomplish, then your organization’s values describe how you want to accomplish your vision. Long-term success in scaling a team requires an alignment between what employees value and what the organization values. Without this alignment, you’ll have a hard time finding and keeping employees on your new or expanding teams.

Articulating your vision and living your values helps create the final ingredient of successfully scaling a team: an effective culture. Organizational culture is the summation of how people within an organization interact with each other and work together.

Like vision and values, the most effective cultures have a purpose and a direction. Ask yourself this: what kind of workplace do you want to create for your new team? How will this new team impact how current employees communicate and collaborate?

The Solution

The go-to solution many companies are using when building a scalable team is to hire specialized solutions providers for offshore teams to augment the workload. This allows companies to scale up as work increases without adding additional work on the current team and get upside down on payroll costs. Working in tandem with the internal team, the external team can expand or contract its role as needed. Normally, these types of teams cost a fraction of what it would normally cost when trying to build an in-house team. This allows you to offset the budget, save on costs, and manage your time better.

An outsourcing service provider such as Booth & Partners can not only provide quality talent for teams at a lower cost, but also augment and tailor-fit employees who will be the perfect match for companies and their vision, values, and culture. Whether you’re worried about communication barriers or culture fitment, these problems are always the number #1 problem that is always solved by outsourcing solutions providers. 

The burden of adding manpower effectively switches from you to the agency you choose at retainer rates that can often rival a single senior employee. This allows you to test and scale new campaigns and refine business initiatives over time without having to increase your overhead costs.

Ready to build your own offshore team? Get in touch with us and we will help you throughout the outsourcing process.