Like probably many other companies, we’ve already hit 2 walls so far when scaling IntelligentBee: one at 8 people, one at 15 and we’re currently facing another wall hitting: the one at 30 people.
After struggling for more than half a year with this, we thought it’s time to do something about it.
We don’t pretend we know exactly what would be the outcome of this, but we sure know what we want to achieve: sustainable scaling. Or, if we must have a clearer objective, let’s say we want to hit 100 people. I know it doesn’t sound very much like a business objective, but it kinda makes sense as we’re a services company . Therefore our main output depends very much on people’s knowledge, expertise and skillset.
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We’re IntelligentBee, an online development services company, 6 years old. We do mainly web applications and recently we decided we want to tackle mobile apps.
I’m Costi, Founder and CEO. I have a technical background backed up by some business studies and experience. A geek turned on the dark side of management like some people like to call it 🙂
The quest: scaling
Statistically, our scaling was around 40% growth rate per year since we started. This might sound awesome and it actually is: things were crazy all these years. We’ve gathered lots of achievements and learning under our belt . Looking ahead I can’t see how we’re going to scale this company further using the same approach, tools and structure.
So, the quest is mainly about : how we’re scaling our company. I’m sure there would be lots of bumps along the way and therefore lots of learning involved. I’m thinking about writing down all about it and create what’s called a growth log for IntelligentBee.
That being said, I do now know what my next posts would be about specifically, but they will sure be about one of the three main topics: something we’ve learned, something we screwed up or something we got right.
IB 2.0
We called all this process IB 2.0. IB stands for IntelligentBee. 2.0 stands for a completely new “version” of ourselves as a company as we understand that if you have a black-box and you don’t change the Input but in the same time you’re expecting (somehow) the Output to change, you’re either a fool (or a sorcerer). We’re neither (eh, maybe we actually don’t want to be the first… remains to see if we are or not) so we decided to change the Input.
The Input
What do I mean by the Input ?
For us, the Input is how we’re doing things in our company. There are specific ways of doing things suitable for each growth stage you’re in. For us, the way we’re currently doing things starts to lose it’s effectiveness and certainly it’s not a recipe for success having our plans in mind. It’s simple: how we’re doing things now got us to roughly 30 people, if we’re continuing like that — we’re going to stay at 30. If we need to grow to 100, we need to “change gears” 🙂
So, stay tuned if you would like to see how we’re getting there, what we’re going to learn and what we’re going to break. We hope to get there in a couple of years, but hey — you never know! What we do know is 2 things: 1. we’re gonna get there and 2. it’s going to be quite a ride!