Lucy - BQ Magazine EditorGrowing a startup sounds great at first. More customers, more sales, a bigger team. What’s not to like? Then the small problems start adding up. Someone’s waiting for approval. Sales is chasing the warehouse for an update. Finance has a different number from the one in the sales report, and nobody has time to figure out why. Meanwhile, everyone’s busy. That’s the strange part. People are working all day, but getting things done seems to take longer than it used to.
Usually, the business hasn’t suddenly become badly managed. It’s just that the old way of doing things isn’t working anymore
1. The Founder Still Has to Make Every Decision
In a small startup, this is pretty normal. The founder knows the customers, the suppliers, the numbers – pretty much everything. People ask, decisions get made, and work moves on. But what happens when 30 or 40 people are waiting for that same person to make decisions? A manager needs a purchase approved. Someone wants to resolve a customer complaint but isn’t sure what they’re allowed to offer. Another employee can’t move forward because nobody has signed off on something fairly routine. And the founder has their own work to do.
Start by looking at what’s actually waiting for approval. Check last week’s requests. How many needed the founder’s involvement, and how many could a manager have handled? Set spending limits. Let department heads deal with routine issues. Give people ownership of projects and make it clear when they need to escalate something. The founder still makes the big calls. They just don’t need to be involved in every little one.
2. Sales Thinks Everything Is Fine, Operations Knows It Isn’t
This is where things can get awkward. Sales confirms a delivery date with a customer. Operations hasn’t received the stock. Customer service is still working from the original schedule. Now everyone is trying to sort it out, and the customer is wondering why the business can’t get its act together. The information might have been available all along. Maybe the supplier delay was mentioned in an email. Maybe somebody updated a spreadsheet but didn’t tell the sales team. Either way, the right people didn’t have the information when they needed it.
A shared view of what’s happening can prevent a lot of this. Sales should be able to check stock availability before promising a delivery date. If an order is delayed, that status needs to be visible without someone having to make three phone calls. A quick meeting between department leads once a week can help, too. Just cover what’s stuck, what’s coming up and where someone needs help from another team.
3. The Team Has Too Many Tools and Still Has to Do Everything Manually
A CRM gets added because sales needs one. Finance uses its own software. Inventory ends up in a spreadsheet, and somebody introduces another platform to manage projects. Fair enough. Each tool probably solved a real problem at the time. But then the business grows, and the gaps between those tools become everyone’s problem. Customer details get entered twice. Reports don’t match. Someone spends half a day pulling information from different systems because there’s no easy way to get the numbers they need. That’s a lot of time to lose over something that should be quite very simple.
Pick one process and follow it through. Take an order from the moment it’s placed to the point it’s delivered. Where does someone have to enter the same information again? Where are employees waiting for updates? Which steps could be handled automatically? Fix those gaps before buying more software. And don’t automate a process just because it’s repetitive. If the process itself is wrong, automation will only help you repeat the same mistakes faster.
4. Someone Wants to Hire More People, Will That Actually Help?
Maybe. But it’s worth asking a few questions first. Imagine a warehouse where orders keep going out late. The obvious suggestion is to bring in two more employees. Except the stock is badly organised, packing stations are always occupied, and staff keep walking across the building to find what they need. Two more people aren’t going to fix much of that. The same thing happens in office teams. Managers add headcount because work is piling up, but the approval process is still slow, and nobody has sorted out the handovers between departments.
Before opening another vacancy, look at where the time is going. Are people genuinely handling more work than they can manage? Or are they spending hours chasing information, fixing errors and waiting for decisions? Sort out the obvious problems first. If the workload is still too much, then hiring makes sense. There’s no point adding to payroll when the real issue is how the work gets done.
5. The Warehouse Has Outgrown Its Layout
This one doesn’t always get much attention until things start getting really frustrating. The warehouse was fine when the business was smaller. Now stock is taking up every available space, packing benches are crowded, and employees keep moving things around just to get through their shift. People find ways to manage. They leave boxes wherever there’s room or borrow equipment from another workstation. It works, sort of. Until order volumes increase again.
Spend some time watching how the work actually happens. Follow a few orders from receiving to dispatch. Where are people wasting time? Which items are difficult to find? Are finished orders piling up because there’s nowhere to put them? Sometimes, moving a shelf or rearranging a workstation is enough. Other setups need additional storage or purpose-built fixtures.
For certain framing and support applications, components such as steel angle can be used in workstation and storage assemblies. The specifications still need to match the job, particularly where load-bearing requirements are involved.
Supplier delays are worth checking, too. If a component doesn’t arrive on time, an installation can sit unfinished while the team waits.
So, Where Do You Start?
Not by trying to fix five things at once. Look at what’s causing the most trouble right now. Maybe approvals have been sitting around for days. Maybe sales keeps promising delivery dates that operations can’t meet. Or maybe employees are spending far too much time updating spreadsheets that should be connected in the first place.
Pick one problem and get to the bottom of it. Make a change, give it a couple of weeks, and see whether anything improves. Are orders moving faster? Are fewer tasks getting stuck? Has the team stopped chasing the same information every day? If something works, keep it. If it doesn’t, try something else.
A growing business will always have problems to deal with. The trick is not letting the same small issues follow it around as the team, workload and costs keep getting bigger.