Having been through 4 different venture-backed, high-growth situations, there are a large number of lessons that I have learned (sometimes the hard way!). Here are five of them, in no particular order.

• Be disciplined in your hiring – Just about everyone acknowledges that hiring is the most important thing that you can do as a leader.

  One of the keys to success I have found is to make sure your internal team is coordinated and clear on their responsibilities, hiring personas and interviewing techniques. Each team member needs to come to an interview prepared – they can’t just wing it regardless of how busy they are. If this is the most important thing your teams do, then give them the tools and the direction to do it right.

• Ensuring Data Coherence – I’ll admit it, I am a data geek. The numbers help me manage and keep the business on track. I have found it very difficult to scale, let alone run your current business effectively if there are multiple silos of data that are not accessible or don’t relate to each other. Spend the time and energy early in the company history to get this key infrastructure component right, or spend much more time, money and energy later – when you will be forced to.
• Growing your Business and Optimizing it are two very different things – They are sequential, not parallel tasks. There is a time to plant and a time to harvest. Grow. Evolve. Operate.
• Team Alignment – We’ve all seen it before, where different teams have different goals, different agendas. While it can – in the right situation – be effective in a survival-of-the-fittest kind of way, I have found more often or not, it causes a huge amount of headache, swirl and frustration.

  This is particularly true at the senior levels. If your senior management team does not have a shared set of goals and vision, then expect friction. If your CEO is pitting one senior leader against another, be aware. As they say, things roll downhill…

• Culture Happens – Either intentionally make it what you want it to be, or it will happen without your input. Sr. Management must be committed to making it a pervasive part of your company, otherwise it will just be a checkbox that no one takes seriously.