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Scaling a business is one of the most demanding challenges in corporate life and increasingly it falls to the Chief People Officer to make or break it. Get the people strategy right and growth becomes sustainable. Get it wrong and even the most promising business can buckle under its own momentum. We spoke to five people leaders about what scaling actually demands of them and what they've learned along the way.
Scaling doesn't mean adding headcount
Tanya Channing, Chief People and Culture Officer at tech unicorn Pipedrive, has one of the sharpest takes on what scaling actually requires - and it starts with what it doesn't require. When she joined the Estonian CRM business in 2022, the instinct from the executive team was to invest cash and double headcount as quickly as possible. Channing pushed back. "I said it had to slow down - building profitably doesn't always mean adding people. Growing revenue doesn't mean we have to grow headcount, especially when we have a digital acquisition model."
Tanya Channing
Chief People and Culture Officer at tech unicorn Pipedrive
Her CV - HR Director at Burger King, Chief of Staff to the CIO at Worldpay, CHRO at Nets Group - gives her unusual authority on the subject. Private equity, she says, taught her that the HR role in a scaling business demands far more than traditional people and culture work. "I have learned a lot about post-merger integration, re-engineering organisations, creating synergies and rebuilding cultures to create better combined value."
At Pipedrive, the challenge now is shifting the organisation's mindset from a family to a high-performing sports team. "We need to build a business with a healthy performance culture that puts its employees and customers at the heart of decision-making while adding governance and controls to ensure we operate as if we are a publicly listed company."
I said it had to slow down - building profitably doesn't always mean adding people. Growing revenue doesn't mean we have to grow headcount, especially when we have a digital acquisition model
The trick, she says, is doing all of that while protecting the people-first culture and entrepreneurial spirit that made the business worth scaling in the first place. "We have to be really careful about what we do and how we introduce new ideas because there needs to be a balance between our original culture and standing on the shoulders of greatness."
Culture is the engine, not a casualty
Ceri Gott, former Chief Growth and Culture Officer at Hawksmoor, has overseen one of the more remarkable scaling stories in British hospitality. She joined when the restaurant group had 150 people across three London sites. Today it employs 1,250 people across 13 restaurants internationally, has been named a Top 100 Best Company to Work For for 13 consecutive years, and was the first UK restaurant to become a BCorp. The growth has been considerable. The culture, she argues, is why it held together.
Ceri Gott
Former Chief Growth and Culture Officer at Hawksmoor
"At the start of 2021 the hospitality industry was locked down and we furloughed a lot of our staff. I really thought we're going to break our streak - we can't possibly scoop Best Companies to work for this year. But we did." When 50,000 people applied for roughly 600 jobs during the post-Covid recruitment crisis, Hawksmoor bounced back faster than its competitors.
Gott credits the culture directly. "Back to my love of research - I recently did work with Professor Colin Lindsay, who has done decades of research showing that businesses where engagement is higher have more profitable operations and healthier employees. They basically live longer."
For Gott, scaling without losing what made a business special comes down to being clear about values and uncompromising about them at every stage of growth. Hawksmoor's five - personality, support, development, quality, and working hard and being nice to people - sound deceptively simple. The results are not. Even as the business has grown internationally, 98% of employees say they share Hawksmoor's values and 97% believe the company truly welcomes everyone. "It's hard, I won't pretend otherwise - all the different countries have different employment regulations. What we abide by wherever we are is those five values — it really helps to tie it together."
