Cracking the Organizational Design Code for Hard Tech B2B Growth

• Sells B2B

• Has a long development cycle for new products & solutions (6 or more months)

• Has products that require specialist engineers or salespeople AND sells to customers

  who buy to solve problems

• Sells into Enterprise Purchasing (multiple constituents coming together for a purchasing decision)

1. Scalability and Flexibility: 

Properly designing your organizational structure is critical to your company's growth, and in the case of fast-growing Hard Tech companies, this is not a one-time exercise. Adept CEOs realize their company's organizational structure will change once, perhaps multiple times, during each growth phase. Furthermore, waiting to restructure solely in response to changing business conditions can paralyze your company and destabilize your employees and their effectiveness. In other words, you must be proactive and nimble if you want to scale and do it quickly. 

2. Leadership, Decision-making, and Organizational Development: 

In the early stages of your Hard Tech start-up, you, as the CEO/Technical Founder, make most of the decisions, even though those decisions may fall well outside your technical expertise. However, as your company grows, you must look 18 months ahead at how your role as CEO will evolve and how the company will operate a year and a half from now. 

• What do we mean by the "org of 18 months from now"? It means that by the time you've figured out your organizational structure (again) and staffed it up, at least a year will have passed. By then, you'll have outgrown the org that fixes the problems you have today.  

• An org design process begins with envisioning your future business's inputs and constraints. For example: 

• How many customers will you have in 2 years (not today)? 

• How many salespeople will you have, and how will you structure your sales and marketing teams to work together? 

• How many products a year will you need to generate? 

•  And how many markets will you serve in 2 years (not today)? 

Building a thriving tech start-up requires more than just a groundbreaking idea; it requires your willingness to address the challenges associated with organizational structure. Getting the answers right for your business today, but wrong for your business 18-months-from-now, will severely hamper your business instead of accelerating it. 

3. What else? Other "18-month issues":

Your business will look different as you progress through revenue stages. Growth is a high-grade problem to have, but it's a problem nonetheless if you haven't structured your org accordingly. 

• Your org structure will naturally become more complex as you grow:

  • The number of people will grow.

  • The number of functions will increase. 

  • You'll need more managers as the number of people, products, and places in your company grows.

• However, the complexity that evolves naturally isn't the hard part! You'll also have to anticipate the following:

  •  R&D/Engineering synergies and conflicts

  • Sales and Marketing's common missions vs. their (sometimes) divergent approaches and objectives

  • The complexity of your sales process and the need for team selling, account penetration, and digital marketing

  •  The reliance of (current or future) growth on your ability to:

  • Scale your operations 

  • Innovate with new technology, pioneer new products, and discover new markets

• Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, it is one thing to tell your board you can hit multiple customer types (markets), but scaling one while developing another is a proven recipe for disaster.

Unless you have experience doing this.

Seem hard? You need people who have done this successfully and done so at different sizes and stages of a company's growth. That is Market Operandi. We have built our practice on this and done it multiple times with our own companies. MO has well-proven systems for getting you through this.