We know that getting your startup off the ground and flying takes a lot of time and effort. There are no substitutes or magic solutions to realising your ambitions other the hard work of the founders and first employees, but you can follow a series of good practices that can get yours there faster and in a scalable and repeatable way.
Here are 4 best practices to scale your startup fast:
Get the foundation right
The startup environment is a fast moving and dynamic world where things change quickly and growing companies can get left behind. Establishing a good foundation will make your company more stable as it grows. In such a dynamic environment, startups tend to focus all their efforts on getting their product to market as soon as possible, and key elements for the development of the company such as company policies or legal agreements are often given lower priority. But good governance from the outset is an investment that will establish a stable foundation and pay off and in the medium to long term.
Comprehensive company policies are not only key to the development of the company as staff know what is expected of them, it also sends a clear message to your (potential) customers that you take governance and good practice seriously.
Here are 5 key areas:
1) InfoSec (Information Security) – These policies are designed to protect your business, intellectual property and staff. Their goal is to display how your company is always ready, protected and up to date with the latest security news and threats.
Examples of InfoSec policies include: Access Control policy, Cloud Services policy, Remote Access policy or InfoSec Management policy.
2) Staff – Team or staff policies aim to build, inform and protect your team. They will establish the mechanisms to bring new members to your team, as well as the conditions in which they will work for your company. In the post-covid world, these policies are becoming increasingly important due to the increase in remote working.
Paternity/Maternity Leave policy, Flexible working policy, Health and Safety policy, Holiday policy and Remuneration policy are the most usual examples of staff policies.
3) Compliance – The main goal of governance or compliance policies is to show potential prospects that your company is ready and safe to do business with.
Examples of compliance policies are: Data Protection policy, Modern Slavery Statement or Complaints policy.
4) ESG – Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) policies outline your company’s commitment to society and the environment. They are designed to manage your resources and the environmental impacts of your business, achieve cost savings and promote more environmentally friendly practices.
These include: Environmental policy, and Corporate and Social Responsibility policy.
Close deals with well written agreements
Once the company has a good state of basic governance, the next step is to ensure water tight agreements are in place with your customers, suppliers, collaborators, employees, consultants…
Creating your own library of legal agreements gives you the flexibility to close deals with different stakeholders in record time.
Well written agreements help you sell your services, build your team both in-house and outsourced, and protect your business and intellectual property.
Adoptech makes creating agreements easy. Written by lawyers, our agreements are a must-have for a growing startup and include: Confidentiality and Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA), Professional Services contracts, Data processing agreements and SaaS MSA Terms and Conditions.
Get ISO Certified
Once your startup has established a good customer base, a market-fit product and a stable foundation, the next natural step for its growth is the Enterprise world. Enterprise deals are difficult to achieve and close as they require a high level of compliance, precise infosecurity hygiene and specific requirements depending on each company.
In the case of startups, perhaps the best way to approach this process is through certification of a recognised international standard that confirms their level of compliance. ISO Certification is the most established and recognised standard, covering many different fields and certifications.
ISO Certification processes are considered complex and time consuming, they require a high level of commitment from the company and its employees. The most efficient way to achieve ISO certification is to use experienced consultants who know their way around the certification process and can help your company hit the ground running, avoiding unnecessary delays and costly mistakes.
At Adoptech we have done the work to make ISO 27001 certification simple and cost effective, if you want more information on how we can help your company, click here!
Manage and reduce your risks
Establishing your company and signing contracts with large customers is hard work, but when you reach this point, it is more important than ever to maintain a high level of information security to keep those customers.
Security, data protection and cybersecurity breaches are unfortunately becoming more and more frequent in the online world and the trends of the post-covid world are intensifying this.
Companies, especially startups, must have processes in place to identify and manage them quickly so they can minimise their impact.
Processes around BCP and DR, managing data breaches and ensuring due diligence is undertaken to efficiently manage the risks associated with suppliers to prevent a disruption in your supply chain, are key to keeping your startup running should the worst happen.
The Adoptech platform is the one-stop place for all the tools to start, grow and scale a Startup. It provides configurable statutory, InfoSec, ESG, Staff and Compliance policies with a library of over 70 policies.
The Adoptech platform aims to start your company on the right path from the beginning, creating a single source of truth in your enterprise data room and immediately preventing bad practice, productivity sapping use of spreadsheets and email workflows that cannot be scaled or repeated. Adoptech enables companies to create their own BCP DR and manage all their vendors and their risks associated in the same place.
If you want to see how Adoptech can help your Startup, contact us here!
