3. How do you scale from 50 to 500 employees?

The Operations Room: A Podcast for COO’s

In this episode we tackle the question of: How do you scale from 50 to 500 employees?

Our special guest is Kristen Shannon, founder and CEO of Highliner a consultancy that helps high-growth businesses scale across people, systems and processes.

In this episode we get her experiences on the following questions:

• What was the lesson in hiring 800 people in one year?
• How do you get out of your own way when it comes to structure and process?
• What are the scaling inflection points?
• How do you fight against the silos that develop in organisations?
• What are those hires that you're just like, oh my god, how did we survive without it?
• How do you minimise the mini-celebrity status you have as COO in an organisation, where employees massively read things into what you say and do?
• How much of your time is spent on rolling out processes versus helping people become better leaders and managing change?
• How do you make an organisation more accountable? How do you hold a team to account in an OKR check-in?
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Speaker notes and references:

Rocket Fuel - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rocket-Fuel-Essential-Combination-Business/dp/1941631150

Blitzscaling - https://amzn.eu/d/5J6EyBP

Kristen is a results-driven executive with over 10 years of experience in strategy development, operational execution, and organisational scaling. Her career focus has been working in high-pressure companies going through periods of significant and fast-paced growth.

She has worked for ambitious organisations that have doubled in size year on year, leading both recruitment of over 800 FTE a year as well as leading and scaling teams in multiple functional areas.

Kristen is the founder and CEO of Highliner. At Highliner, we are passionate about helping companies design and implement practical, scalable solutions that are the highest leverage to the organisations. We work with companies both on codifying their organisational culture and strategy to support growth as well as auditing and designing the operational systems, processes and tools needed to accomplish their key business objectives at scale. Some of our clients have included iProov (raised £70m growth round), Oxford Ionics (raise £30m Series A), Cisco Meraki (post acquisition) and Sonantic (acquired by Spotify).

https://www.linkedin.com/company/highliner-technology/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristen-shannon/

https://highlinertechnology.com/

This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:
Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy