vChief is proud to be included on the Inc 5000 list for the fourth time in a row in 2024. Since 2021, we have grown from a team of one to a team of 16 and more than quadrupled our revenue. As a fractional executive network, keeping up with organic demand has required us to transform every aspect of our organization to maintain the quality and responsiveness that has driven our growth while serving hundreds of clients. Here are five strategic decisions that we believe have been key to sustaining our growth despite economic headwinds.
Start With a Focused Niche
For the first five years of our company’s existence, from 2016 to 2021, we were completely focused on a very narrow niche. We exclusively filled fractional chief of staff positions because that was where we had the most expertise and where we saw the biggest hole in the market. As demand for our services grew, we stayed focused on that role, building our reputation as the go-to source for top chief of staff talent.
Many startups are afraid to focus on such a narrow niche, thinking they will have a broader target market if they offer more services. But this can quickly turn into a “spray and pray” strategy, where you have to speak to such a broad audience that your messaging doesn’t resonate with anyone. Starting with a narrow specialization like we did helped us define our market and tailor our value proposition to ensure it met the specific needs of our audience. Even though we still had to educate many of our customers about the chief of staff role — unlike the more familiar chief operating officer (COO) or chief financial officer (CFO) roles — we were able to craft tight messaging that resonated with our target audience, and develop a loyal following by offering a high quality service.
Let Customer Demand Drive Service Expansion
In 2022, we expanded our services by adding four new roles. We chose these roles based on an analysis of our data and customer feedback. We reviewed the scopes of work for all of the placements we had made throughout 2021, and we saw that while the positions were called Chief of Staff, the support clients were actually seeking was aligned with other job titles. In fact, 40 percent of the fractional CoS roles we filled in 2021 actually matched the job description of a fractional HR business partner (HRBP). Additionally, many of our clients had leveraged the high-level financial analyst skills of our talent, which aligned more with a fractional CFO role, and others relied on their consultants’ senior operations expertise to fill a role that more closely matched a fractional COO position.
We had also received feedback from some clients that they were looking for someone to provide a higher level of operational support than an executive assistant or virtual assistant could be expected to provide, but didn’t need someone with as much experience as a Chief of Staff.
Based on all of this customer feedback and analysis of our internal data, we started offering Associate Chief of Staff, COO, CFO, and HRBP roles. This was a major change effort that required adaptations from every department, from recruiting more consultants into our talent pool, to expanding our familiarity with the typical scope of work of each role, and building out marketing and sales assets to spread the word about our new services.
If we had added new roles just for the sake of trying to reach new audiences, we might have invested all of this time into recruiting and marketing only to find out that demand for those roles wasn’t as high as we had thought. By letting customer demand drive our expansion, we knew our investments would pay off.
Embrace Automation to Keep Up With Demand
From 2021 to 2023, we were growing so fast that our manual processes for matching clients with talent, handling leads, and managing our talent pool were creating bottlenecks that limited our ability to keep up with demand. We knew we needed to invest in new software, but tech investments are risky. Most providers promise similar benefits, but some products fall short of expectations. Unfortunately, it’s often only after spending significant time and effort on implementation that these limitations become clear.
After extensive research, we chose to implement Zoho to streamline our lead generation processes and to manage our talent pool, and it was a major success. In addition to eliminating a lot of tedious manual work, implementing Zoho dramatically improved our visibility into our business. Before Zoho, we were managing our talent pool with spreadsheets, which meant at any given time we didn’t know how many consultants were actually active in our pool, and we couldn’t run any analytics on our talent pool or our engagements. Zoho’s analytics have changed the game for our talent and matching teams, allowing us to make informed and strategic decisions about recruiting.
Use Fractional Staffing to Expand Capacity with Minimal Risk
As a fractional staffing firm, we have walked the talk at many points throughout our growth by leveraging fractional staffing to increase capacity without incurring the overhead of full-time hires. And even when we have had the budget for new full-time hires, we have still found that the fractional staffing model made more sense because the flexibility helped us minimize risk. During times of economic uncertainty or significant change within the company, the kind of support we needed could dramatically change within six months.
In 2021, our fastest growth phase was driven by a single client whose federal funding had dramatically increased. At one point, this client accounted for over a third of our revenue. Although we had a surplus of funds and needed additional capacity, we recognized the risks of over-relying on one client. Instead of committing to full-time hires, we brought on fractional marketing executives to overhaul our marketing and lead generation. This approach provided the expertise and support we needed while allowing us the flexibility to quickly adjust expenses if the client’s engagement decreased or ended.
Cross-Train and Leverage Generalists
As startups grow, there are predictable inflection points where the complexity of the organization requires the creation of new positions to prevent siloes and breakdowns in communication. As a team of 16, we’re still small enough that we have some hybrid roles that are essentially two or three part-time roles merged into one. To excel in that kind of role, you need to be a strong generalist and an excellent project manager. Leveraging a generalist in this way also has the added advantage that these hybrid team members end up gaining a lot of institutional knowledge, and because of that, they can cover for a lot of different team members when they’re out sick or on vacation. That makes a huge difference in being able to live out our core value of balance.
But we’re also big enough that we now have to be intentional about improving cross-departmental communication. In the past few months we’ve started doing a series of all-hands meetings to give everyone an overview of what each person in the team does. Our first one was on marketing, which is one of the newest functions in our company. Next we’ll cover sourcing for the sales team. These meetings give everyone a more holistic view of the organization and help us prevent communication breakdowns that could cause bottlenecks or a drop in quality.
Scaling our Services While Maintaining Our Standards
I’m proud of our company for making these smart, forward-looking decisions, and taking calculated risks to respond to a surge in customer demand. These strategic decisions have helped us to scale up without losing the high-touch boutique feel and the level of service we’re known for.
