Imagine your company like a boat. At the start, your small fishing boat is easy to steer, changing directions whenever required with ease. As you scale up, the boat only gets bigger, taking on more people, goals, and challenges. Now your boat is no longer as easy to maneuver, meaning a change of direction comes at a higher cost in terms of time and effort.
It’s at this juncture that your company can go back to your big rocks or key performance indicators to ensure that you’re driving your ship to complete alignment and growth. Throughout the last 10+ years coaching CEOs and their leadership teams, it is clear to me that keeping a team focused, aligned, and held accountable is a difficult challenge.
With the 10 Rockefeller Habits companies can learn how to pursue their big rocks and attain the desired alignment to scale up properly.
In the latest episode of our Podcast, I sat down with Rui Costa, from Veniam, and Javier Martínez, from Signaturit. We discussed how they steer their ships. We were joined by Pedro Torres, Engineering Director at Talkdesk, who led the discussion.
How these companies steer their ships to scale up
According to Torres, there’s never a moment when we say: I think we’ve scaled enough. Inevitably, we all want to push forward and drive better performances. This is where tracking success comes into the conversation.
Whether you call them big rocks or OKRs, these tools are crucial for achieving full alignment. Here at ScaleUp Valley, we preach the word of the 3 big rocks. This allow the teams of your company to work towards the same goals.
The lucky number is 3 because a lot of objectives has companies falling into an empty pattern of working towards too many goals. Then, what’s meant to focus you ends up stealing your focus. Because there are too many battlefronts to keep track of.
This approach, designed to fit the culture of both companies, is being used by Signaturit and Veniam. The most important part of the puzzle that both mentioned? Establishing their KPIs from the very start.
Your company begins when the key indicators are established
Both Martínez and Costa disclosed that their companies were founded with key indicators on the table. For Signaturit, they might not have known they were called indicators, but they were something that they established on the first day.
Over at Veniam, they actually picked only one KPI for the entire first year of the company. This action helped them hone in on why they were creating the company to begin with.
With these strong foundations, based on the principles that we see established by the Rockefeller Habits, these companies have achieved substantial growth and have no plans for slowing down.
There’s a lot more to these stories on scaling up that you can hear by listening to the whole episode. Then, keep listening and keep scaling. And if you want to know more about ScaleUp Valley initiatives, calendar and purpose, join our community by subscribing to the ScaleUp Valley newsletter.