Your organization is experiencing rapid growth—leads are increasing, accounts are growing, and you’re on track to surpass your financial goals for the rest of the year. The only thing missing is the people to support this exponential growth, right? The solution that typically comes to mind is hiring, but hiring to support increases in scale is much more complex than it sounds. In fact, there are three common pitfalls to be aware of if you’re thinking about hiring at scale.
1. Managing the Ebb and Flow of Task Work
Teams often struggle to keep up with one-time requests, internal strategy changes and resolving client concerns. Managing the ebbs and flows of cumbersome tasks and surprise requests is an everyday reality for strategists, managers and the like. Even if they can finish the tasks, what else gets sacrificed?
The recent ETA to RSA transition, for example, placed immense strain on organizations, with a complex account structure relying on manual processes. Other important priorities—not to mention strategic growth-focused work—got pushed to the sidelines. In a quickly changing digital landscape, it’s important to note these types of changes can be difficult to predict and even more difficult to support, especially as your business continues to grow.
2. Misalignment of Your Best Practices and Processes
Another common pitfall when you’re trying to hire your way to scale is best practice alignment—which all too quickly leads to misalignment of processes. Imagine you have a team of 50 strategists: the larger your team, the more difficult it becomes to ensure that your successful playbook—the one that brings the results clients love—is being executed perfectly across a large number of people. This ultimately means you need to hire more people—such as managers—to coordinate and ensure the processes you created are being followed and implemented.
While you’re trying to keep pace with your portfolio growth, there’s a domino effect that can happen when you grow the team: you have to add in layers of management, which leads to margin compression—among other issues—very quickly. In this example, the layers of management don’t contribute to your bottom line. While their role is critical for ensuring best practices are being followed, they’re not the ones producing revenue for your organization.
3. High-Quantity Work Can Be A Low-Quality Experience
It’s no secret that high-quantity work isn’t as fulfilling, especially when it’s manual. The easiest way to burn out smart, talented marketers is by having them click around a platform 50 times a day for each account. Now multiply that amount by the number of accounts they have. Quick math tells us that if they have 50 accounts, 2,500 clicks a day would burn a person out quickly.
Burnout leads to churn—and churn will only increase if its causes aren’t addressed —since today’s marketers know that technologies exist to eliminate menial task work. Those marketers want to work for companies where they can focus on strategy and client success—especially in this market. In short, hiring at scale quickly puts employee retention—as well as maintaining a thriving company culture—at risk.
Scale Your Advertising Strategies with Automation, Not Increased Headcount
Historically low-quality tasks—such as onboarding, site tagging, budget management, building PowerPoint decks, auditing accounts and so much more—took up the majority of the day. This manual work, however, wasn’t ideal when you had less accounts, and isn’t going to be ideal on your way to doubling and continuing to scale. When you do away with manual work you’ll finally have time to pivot away from the tasks that keep your business afloat to the high-cognitive work that takes your competitive advantage to the next level.
Thankfully there’s a solution to ensuring both the essential tasks get done, while also having time for the strategic and impactful work. Automation—specifically Robotic Process Automation for Advertising (RPA4A)— can drastically transform your team’s capacity, processes, and results to help you turn almost any digital advertising challenge—like scaling your organization—into an opportunity for your business.
Ready to learn more? Book a demo today.
