Barnacle processes

Barnacle processes, invented when growth is lacking, can slow and kill otherwise great startups. Tech startups have a general culture of going fast. When growth is slow in a culture like that, people often still want to move around quickly. When that happens, people need to run in circles to keep up the momentum.

All this running around results in a whole lot of activity building systems that would never be considered if growth was happening. These systems add bureaucracy to a startup and mean more calories need to be expended to get things done. If growth picks up, these processes hang on like barnacles and slow you down. You're left needing to either scrape those barnacles away or overcompensate for them, expending extra resources.

The simplest way to avoid creating barnacle processes is to grow. New customers coming in faster than you can comfortably handle are a very productive way to filter work down to the things that matter. Sadly, while 'just grow' is the simplest solution, it's not easy.

Usually, there's a good reason your business isn't growing as fast as the company culture expects it to. It's rarely just a quick internal decision to start growing again. That being said, you need to be honest when growth is missing and make sure that the resources you have are correctly focused on getting growth back on track.

Another simple but difficult way to avoid barnacles is to downsize. Adjust the business to keep the excess capacity to a minimum. This is often a very difficult call to make. Company culture will take a hit, and it may send a negative signal to the market. I've almost never seen this happen as an early choice.

Often downsizing to match growth happens as a lagging result of several months of shitty metrics when someone realises that the 'high output' from the last quarter or two are just barnacles and not shifting the company back to growth. Again, here, the best thing to do is remain honest.

Focus people on growth. If you have people in the business who aren't on the coal face of sales, don't try to hide the reality from them. You may have people in roles outside the commercial team with ideas that could unlock some new avenues for growth. That's a much better use of their time than having them set up new processes to optimise problems that would be easy to ignore if people were busy.

You can certainly build a company around growing slowly. Not every business needs to triple-double and raise big rounds of VC. The issue only comes up when the speed of growth mismatches the internal expectations and culture. It sometimes feels ridiculous to be so singly focused on growing. Every business has a ceiling somewhere, but the very nature of startups remains in growth. This is true even now that money is expensive and things like profitability are front and centre. In that world, one focused on speed and growth, there's little room for barnacles.