As an example, Isturiz up until recently was the primary contact for very large clients, handling all of the communications and these delicate relationships. She’s slowly grooming an employee to take over that responsibility so she can focus more on strategy and leadership.
A structured framework
As Bellefield has undergone rapid growth, Isturiz says it’s important to manage the growth in an organized way that doesn’t compromise the agility of the business. You want to keep the entrepreneurial culture and atmosphere, while adding policies, procedures, road maps and planning.
Bellefield’s leadership achieved that by hiring consultants to add organizational pieces to the company. She says, for example, they had experts come in and help bring order to the sales organization with documented policies, procedures, sales methods and sales materials.
“When you are an entrepreneur and you are the owner and founder and everything, you can fool yourself into thinking you can do it all, and that you know it all,” Isturiz says. “You might know a lot, but it gets to the point where you’ll be smarter when you recognize your limitations — and even though you’ve brought the company to an incredible point, you recognize that the success that brought you to this point is not going to take you to the next level.”
If you don’t have policies and procedures, you risk damaging the culture, she says, and if you make time to continually review those, it proves to your employees that management is listening.
Staffing up
Outside advisers have been used for specific projects, while employees who understand and enjoy working in a fast-paced environment have been harder to come by.
Isturiz says the power of word of mouth has been what Bellefield capitalized on, along with social media posts on LinkedIn.
“We have been extremely lucky, because we have gotten many, many referrals,” she says. “In 80 percent of the people that we have hired, there is at least one degree of connection with someone else at the company.”
They’ve also hired in anticipation of needs, such as hiring people before their latest release. The new version was a rewrite of the product that is now completely hosted on the cloud, so more staff had to be trained in advance.
“We anticipate where we want to go and we staff in advance, for the most part, and that goes to a lot of planning and organization to be able to do that,” Isturiz says. “I’m super OCD and anal when it comes to planning and organization, because I believe in that saying: Failing to plan is planning to fail.”
