Established operating model to sustain scale-up growth
Case study:
Established operating model to sustain scale-up growth
- Situation
- A SaaS scale-up grew at 50% CAGR, but the founding team-led setup did not keep pace with demand and complexity, creating execution bottlenecks across sales, delivery and product
- New investors required a scalable operating model to reduce founding team dependency, sustain the next growth phase and improve profitability
- Actions
- Identified the few structural bottlenecks and critical growth and execution use cases across customer acquisition, onboarding, ramp-up, expansion and cross-selling as demand and complexity increased
- Rebuilt the organization and operating model from a blank sheet around these critical use cases with clear roles, decision boundaries and explicit decision thresholds to reduce founding team dependency
- Set make-or-buy and partner decisions to balance internal capabilities with scalable external capacity
- Established workforce planning and a clear hiring plan to close critical capability gaps
- Ramped up and implemented the new organization with hands-on execution support
- Results
- Use-case-driven operating model implemented and embedded into day-to-day execution
- Founding team dependency reduced through clear roles, decision thresholds and empowered teams
- Added external leadership capacity by hiring a group-level COO to professionalize execution