For consultancies, organisational growth can typically stall at about the 50- or 60-person mark where the drive and growth focus of the founders in the initial years hits the realism of the need to manage all the moving parts that comes with increased scale. To successfully break through this barrier and for you to transition to become a mature service provider, you’ll need to get internally aligned and organised so that internal and external service standards do not suffer.

 Here are 10 elements to be aware of when addressing this challenge.

1.       Make sure your founders are all aligned. This transitional phase moves the organisation from a small controllable organisation to a larger, less familiar one. This can cause significant internal debate about how to do this and if it’s even desirable. Get this all out before you make the commitment to grow.

2.       Get your governance right. This means ensuring the founders are either out of the operational day to day or they are a clear part of the structure, with roles and responsibilities like any employees. You’ll need an executive team and a board, with clear differentiation of roles and clarity of scope.

3.       Ensure your management team is up to scratch. This is the team who need to be comfortable leading an organisation of three times the size, no longer managing people but managing other managers. You need people who are comfortable with data, decision making, communication and team building. They need a toolkit of leadership methods.

4.       Professionalise your Business Development, Client Management, and your Talent Management functions. All these functions need to mature at about the same rate.  Populate with capable, and aligned individuals, give them process to deliver consistency and invest in the right tools.

5.       Revisit your strategy. This means both the approach and the documents that contain the approaches. Allow your newly appointed team to constructively challenge what the “old” organisation have created to this point. This will help with communication, engagement and buy-in.

6.       Revisit your contractor ratio. This will help optimise your talent strategy AND your commercial strategy before you are suddenly locked in to a given position with three times the resources to manage and pay for.

7.       Document your operating model.  Having a well-defined operating model delivers clear benefit. It brings consistency, and scalability to the organisation and clarity and empowerment to individuals.

8.       Use a Professional Services Automation (PSA) tool if you aren’t already. PSA tools help with planning, execution and control of projects as well as workforce management and planning, It becomes significantly more difficult to integrate tools once you’ve grown, so take the opportunity of small scale and RAAS availability to make this leap now.

9.       Review your social media presence. If you’ve relied on relationships to grow, then you may have neglected your marketing. It’s a seat at the table, rather than a competitive advantage; without it you’ll have low mindshare in your market. Social media has a low financial cost though a medium cost for effort. This can be mitigated by making it everyone’s responsibility.

10.   Build your practices. A Practice is a way of organising people into areas of technical specialism. They help educate the Employee base, support and advise consultants, deliver presales and complex solutions, ensure quality of delivery, innovation and thought leadership all of which need to scale at the same rate as your organisation.