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Your startup isn't chaotic because you're growing. It's chaotic because nothing's keeping up.
Updated: 1d
There's a lot to love about working in a growing business. Things move quickly, and people get stuck in, figuring things out as they go. Decisions don’t need to pass through five layers of approval. If something isn’t working, you change it and move on. But somewhere along the way, the things that once made everything work start making everything harder.
The Founder who used to make every decision now has 40 people waiting for an answer. Everyone's busy, and everyone's trying, but somehow, everything feels harder than it should. It’s tempting to blame growth because, of course, things are more complicated when the business is bigger. But growth isn't always the problem; it's that the business is still operating as though it hasn't grown at all.
The Things That Got You Here Won't Necessarily Get You There
When a business has ten people, a lot can happen without anyone giving it much thought. Everyone knows what's going on, people pitch in wherever they're needed, and the Founder can keep most things in their head.
At 30 people, that starts to get trickier. At 50, the cracks can become difficult to ignore. Once you add multiple teams, locations, or markets, the old ways of working start to creak. Information gets lost, and decisions slow down. Responsibilities overlap, and people duplicate work because they don’t know what someone else is doing. None of this means the business is failing; it’s a fairly normal part of growing up.
The problem arises when the business keeps asking its people to compensate for the gaps. The team keeps things moving through sheer effort rather than well-designed ways of working. This isn’t a sustainable scaling model.
More People Won't Necessarily Fix the Problem
When things start creaking, hiring is often the first response. The team is overwhelmed, so you add headcount. There’s too much for managers to do, so you hire another manager. Work keeps falling through the gaps, so you bring in someone to take it on. Sometimes, those are exactly the right decisions.
But adding people to an unclear structure can create more complexity rather than less. Another person in the room won’t automatically clarify who owns a decision. A new manager won’t fix a lack of management support simply by being promoted. Before deciding what the business needs to hire, it’s worth asking a different question: what’s making the work harder than it needs to be?
It might be unclear responsibilities, inconsistent onboarding, a hiring process nobody has properly defined, or managers who are left to figure everything out themselves. Sometimes, the answer is another hire, but sometimes it’s fixing the way the existing team works.
Structure Doesn't Have to Mean Bureaucracy
This is usually where Founders start to worry. Structure sounds like processes, policies, meetings, and endless documentation. It sounds exactly like the sort of thing that slows everyone down and takes the fun out of working in a growing business.
Having a good structure isn’t about adding rules for the sake of it. It’s about making the important things clearer, more consistent, and less dependent on individual people remembering to do them. That might mean agreeing on who makes which decisions, giving managers clearer expectations, introducing a proper approach to hiring, or ensuring new starters get the support they need. It’s nothing particularly revolutionary; it’s just what becomes increasingly important when a business can no longer rely on everyone knowing everything. The aim is to remove unnecessary friction, not introduce more of it.
So, Where Do You Start?
You don't need to overhaul the entire business overnight. Start by paying attention to where people are getting stuck.
Where are decisions getting held up? Is everything still going through the Founder?
Where are people working around broken processes? Look for repeated questions, duplicated work, and things that only happen because one particular person remembers.
Where is growth creating pressure? Recruitment, management, onboarding, communication, or unclear responsibilities?
What will become harder over the next 6–12 months? Fixing a problem before it becomes urgent is usually less painful than dealing with it when everyone's already stretched.
You might find that a few small changes make a significant difference, or you might uncover a bigger gap that needs more thought. Either way, you'll have a clearer idea of what's actually holding the business back.
The answer to growing pains isn't to turn your startup into a corporate machine. You can absolutely keep the pace, the autonomy, and the willingness to figure things out as you go, but you need enough structure to support the people doing the work, rather than relying on them to hold everything together.
The goal isn't to eliminate every bit of chaos. Some of it is part of the fun! It’s to ensure the chaos isn’t getting in the way of building the business you’re trying to become.
At Morrigan Talent, we help growing businesses work out what's no longer keeping up so we can put the right talent and people foundations in place for whatever comes next, without killing the pace that got them here.
