How to built scalable company; Most common mistakes and pitfalls entrepreneurs can fall into. And how to avoid them and reach success!

1. You are not your company
From 0 to 180 employees - the hard way.
Piotr Karwatka, CoCEO Divante

2. Divante
• eBusiness Software House operating since
2008
• Over 180 people at our office in
Wroclaw, Poland
• Offices in Rotterdam, London,
Stockholm
• Clients from Europe, Asia, Africa and US
• Case studies: divante.co/portfolio
Key to success?
• Pragmmatic over egocentric
• Business goals first
• Best tools available

3. The Hero vs Fireman myths
Write down your goals
- Two eye-opening books: “E-myth and Built to sell
- Scalable very often equals to Saleable; company that can
thrive without You personaly
My goal creating Divante?
- The greatest entreprenuer caveat: To do more what I love
(building great computer software)
What I’ve discovered? My company is not Me. To let Divante thrive
I’d to treat it as a product. Consist of people, processes and rules -
built arround priorities: people / projects / money.
But (there is always a “but”) one advice: understand your
processes and services first. Don’t scale your company too early.
Choose right people depending on trust level not only on their
experience.
vs

4. The Hero vs Fireman myths
When doing it wrong: Owner as the best employee ever.
FiremanHero
“We have cool startup culture and flat organization” “We have great structure and processes”
Having “scalable structure” sounds cool. Don’t scale too fast.
At first try focus on selecting right people and establishing trust rather than management theory.

5. Carnivale vs Lent
- It’s better to have co-founder
- Jobs and Wozniak
- Gates and Alen
- ...
- Split responsibilities clearly: business dev. /
production
- Services business is all about selling and new
projects
- It’s almost impossible to sell anything dealing with
fire inside other projcets at once; you loose your
faith
- … but there always will be some fire in projects :)
- Production is about now and here
- Business Development is about tomorrow and
future

6. Focus and priorities
- Focus changes with company growth
- Priorities - kind of signspot thru company growth
- Our priorities at Divante:
1. People
when unhappy problems with rotation, new
hires, productivity and with ...
2. Projects
when not delivered / poor quality / sale
issues - all causes loose of team morale
and problems with ...
3. Money
cashflow problems causes hr problems, no
marketing etc.

7. Define your product
- Scalability is all about repeatability
- Repeatability is all about products
- Services can be formatted as
products - your process is your
product
- Do reality checks - ask customer; test
final artefacts; show your interest
- Start with business value
- Customers are always buying results
- Recurrence is key
It’s not about describing processes but
about implementing them:
- Theory vs. practice: team
communication is key
- Repeat, practice, teach, show ... repeat
The key is to make customers understand your product and process as well.

8. - Repeatability isn’t a rocket science
- Rocket science and aviation have ready
made solution!
- Short(!) Checklists for key processes
- onboarding,
- analysis,
- ongoing development,
- deploy,
- quality and UATs,
- invoicing and payments.
- Set Single Responsible Person for each
checklist / process
Delegating tasks and repeatability is about: setting
clear goals / finding right people / asking for
results.
We use Trust But Verify and No Suprises rules
along with reporting and recurring project review
meetings at Divante to check project statuses

9. 1. At some point building company is about building company, no: coding, selling …
Finding right people letting them do the job
2. Make your business fully repeatable and set checks to be sure how repeatable it is
3. Make decission to happen always closest to the issue - avoid over-structuralization
4. Don’t scale too fast; being “small” has great benefits for your business
5. Embrace the bad news quickly and adopt
6. Choose right, motivated people rather than trying to change one’s or motivate them
Summary

10. Divante UK
286C Chase Road
London, N14 6HF
United Kingdom
(+44) 20 30115154
mblum@divante.co
Divante Sweden
Divante HQ
Divante NL
Divante UK
Divante HQ
17 Dmowskiego Street
50-203 Wroclaw
Poland
(+48) 733 355 596
sales@divante.pl
Divante Holland
Rivium Quadrant
141-181, 2909 LC
Capelle aan den
IJssel
The Netherlands
(+31) 657 625 006
mpolak@divante.co
Divante Sweden
Erik Dahlbergsallén 15
115 20 Stockholm
Sweden
kpodeszwa@divante.co