Pretty amazing. Are the founders/management team working towards what might be considered a high rate of growth or an incremental one? In other words, is the staff level, revenue, expenses, and earnings in some way optimized at the current level? Kudos for focusing on your people- this mix is difficult to achieve for what I am assuming is a bootstrapped business and impossible in a venture-backed one.
To be honest, we haven't put too much thought into the business side of things. We've been growing organically from two people (the two founders, I'm one of them) to now 20 people and things always somehow worked out. We're still learning ourselves, though. Pretty much every day.
Revenue and expenses are relatively stable. We've some really good quarters, and some not so good ones. But overall we're profitable. Sometimes we also spend a lot of money on "fun" things without thinking too much and then realize later that we need to be a bit more careful with spending ;-) In particular cash flow issues when waiting for the big corporations to pay their invoices.
In terms of staff, we're actually at the moment not growing that much any more, simply because having too many people makes it difficult to run such a business as the "family & friends" feeling gets lost and we'd probably need to introduce more hierarchy, which we also don't want.
From past experience, there are two danger points when growing: 25 employees and 50 employees.
At 25, you stop meeting everyone every week. i.e. Random encounters no longer guarantee that every person in the company keeps good contact with everyone else.
At 50 pax, you stop knowing everyone. i.e. You may know the list of employees by heart, but you don't really befriend them anymore.
Of course, these are soft trigger points. You start noticing something different at 20 people, and are sure of what is happening at 30. It is definitely not the fault of the 25th hire :-)
The remedy is always the same: Company culture. Growing slow is a good ingredient towards a good culture, albeit not the single ingredient.
Thanks for that. That's the way we feel as well. We don't have the need to be a huge company. We're quite happy with 20 people and grow slowly now with the right people.
