One of the most critical aspects of creating a roadmap for business growth is staff planning. Other than cash flow analysis, it may be the most crucial element.
Without cash, you don’t have a business. Without people, nothing gets done.
Staff planning ensures you have the right people in place at the right time to support forecasted business growth. Hire too slowly and growth is constrained; customer experience may even be negatively impacted. Hire too quickly and cash is burned unnecessarily.
In a post titled What Your First 100 Hires Will Look Like, Jason Lemkin succinctly lays out a structure for growing a SaaS company from one to 100 employees. With a bit of tweaking, his model can apply to any B2B product company, whether software or manufacturing.