6 lessons for growth stage companies from ScaleUp 2022

---

On May 11, 2022, we joined our presenting sponsor Gallagher and our full community of leaders & innovators for ScaleUp 2022! 

This year’s hybrid event featured an incredible lineup of speakers that included some of the brightest minds in tech, including Cameo CEO Steven Galanis, tastytrade Co-Founder, Co-CEO & President Kristi Ross, and many more! Together, they shared some unforgettable insights and best business practices for scaling companies. 

Here are 6 key lessons that leaders can take away from ScaleUp 2022:

---

1) An innovative company needs to find ways to get people together frequently

“From May of 2021 through the first week of November, our sales team on average was sending out about 800 touches a week. The first day we had everybody back in the office at 1871, they did 3,200 touches, which meant that one day counted for one month of work.”
— Steven Galanis, CEO of Cameo

2) Link your idea to something people already know to clarify what you do

“In the early days, people were asking ‘what’s a virtual assistant’ and people didn’t really get it. But people know what search is. So we said, ‘what we’re doing isn’t a search engine…it’s a do engine. It gets stuff done for you.’ You link your idea to something people already know.”
— Dag Kittlaus, Co-Founder & CEO of Riva Health and Co-Founder of Siri

3) The hybrid workplace can be successful with over-communication & emotional contagion

“Emotional contagion is ultimately what we miss out on in a hybrid setting. It’s the ability to read body language, brainstorm in-person, & know where someone’s coming from. And mimicking that or recreating that in a hybrid world has been one of our biggest challenges.”
— Priti Patel, Chief People Officer at G2

“The key is to bring the right leaders in the room to bring the challenge to the table. Everyone has a role. All the things we talked about managing and motivating teams, tripled down during COVID. It’s about energy, belief, & making sure the leaders of the teams are reaching out multiple times.”
— Cass Baker, President & COO at GainShare

4) Invest in company-wide experimentation that is grounded in your mission

“I think that a company running the most hypothesis-driven experiments wins in their market. If you can have your entire workforce—at whatever level they are—running a set of experiments that’s based on a solid why that everyone knows, I think that you innovate much much more quickly and all over the company.”
— Garry Cooper, Jr., CEO & Co-Founder of Rheaply

5) Put yourself in the right position at the right time & actively foster your relationships

“When it comes to professional relationships outside of the internal workplace, I treat myself like a company and my mentors like investors. So just like you send regular updates to your investors, I find it’s helpful to do that for myself as well.”
— Claude Cimeus, Director of Platform at P33

6) What got you here won’t get you there

“Building a startup is different from scaling your business. When you’re scaling a business, there is this tipping point where you go from having a ton of people who are generalists that own a lot of different things to needing specialists that go deep, understand it at the core, and can optimize it to the nth degree.”
— Kristi Ross, Co-Founder, Co-CEO & President of tastytrade