# The growth journey: from deliberate slow start to 42 people

- **Episode:** [129](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/129.md) (2024-09-19)
- **Type:** interview
- **Tags:** growth, culture, 42-people
- **Time:** 24:50–29:23 (start 1490s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/129?t=1490](https://truthliesandwork.com/129?t=1490)

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[24:50] Al Elliott: So let's find out a little bit more about the culture at SmartClinic. It's grown to 42 people in a very short period of time. In most high-growth companies, particularly when they're tech-led, culture often feels like it's an afterthought, but not in Harry's case. So I want to rejoin the interview where Leanne gets down to business with the culture at SmartClinic
[25:10] Leanne Elliott: Tell us about the growth journey of SmartClinic then. So you start in 2015, how quickly did it grow? How big is it now?
[25:16] Harry Cramer: Initially, not very quickly, deliberately so. We wanted to make sure we got everything right. We spent about probably 3, 4 years really perfecting things. Building the system that I've told you about, building the app that I've told you about, just getting all of the structure in place, getting the right people in the right place. Of course, we started in 2015. Really, it was late 2015 by the time we'd actually hired people and got stuff going. So it took us sort of roughly 4 years to get to a stage where we kind of felt like, okay, we're good now, we can really start growing. That takes us to the end of 2019. Of course, the pandemic happened. So All of a sudden things looked very different. But from that point onwards, we've grown quite quickly and we've been really, really lucky. And I'm so grateful to every single client who's ever put their faith in working with us, because it does take faith. You know, you're potentially going to spend money on a service, you're potentially going to get— put a bit of trust in an organization to actually look after your staff properly, engage with your staff properly, have appropriate conversations with with your staff. So it does take a real leap of faith engaging an occupational health provider, and I do recognize that. And we feel really privileged every time a client chooses us. Fortunately, more recently, that is quite frequent. You know, we, we are growing quite quickly. Um, we try not to grow ridiculously quickly. We don't want to grow to a point where things are so unmanageable. I would never like to get to a stage where the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. But similarly, some growth is great because with growth comes more opportunity to reinvest in the company, reinvest in the technology, for example, hire more and better qualified people, implement things that just make you better, make you better as a company. And in that sense, growing a business is hard because The bigger it is, the more challenges there are. But it's also easier because the bigger it is, the more opportunities there are and the more resources there are. Again, talking about that episode that you're talking— that we referenced earlier, you— and I've heard you talk about this before, actually— you talk about how the 13th hire is the most difficult one, don't you?
[27:27] Al Elliott: So true
[27:29] Harry Cramer: Whether it's exactly the 13 number, I don't know, but it is so true. Around about that number, that's the stage where you're Um, big enough to have a proper business and you've got proper clients who have quite high expectations of you, but still quite small without much structure and without much resource, I would probably say from that day onwards it does get a bit easier
[27:50] Leanne Elliott: So what was the biggest learning curve for you, do you think, from a people and culture perspective, going, as you said, from that tricky 12, 13, 14 up to, up to 42?
[28:00] Harry Cramer: Common question people would say is, what, you know, What's your biggest mistake you made, or what would you do differently, and stuff like that? And I think it's really difficult to answer what would I do differently, because every mistake you ever make, you learn from, and it sort of makes you a little bit better in a way. Sounds a bit corny, that, doesn't it? But, but it's true. It also gives you opportunity to actually— if you made a mistake, there's a hole somewhere, you know. You might— if you've accidentally done something wrong, then it was probably too easy to have got that thing wrong. So there's a hole there that you could fix. So until you make that mistake, sometimes you don't know there's a hole there and you can, you can plug it. Data protection is a very common example of that, and you'd never really want anything to get to a stage where there's been a data breach or anything like that. So you have to try and preempt what those risks are, what those holes are. How could I accidentally make a data breach or those sorts of things? Um, But yeah, I mean, I think that's probably been one of the more significant learnings. I've learned a lot in terms of working with people as well. You have a very grandiose idea of how you're going to be as a manager before you are one. When you become one, it changes. It's a lot harder than you expect it to be. Easy conversations are easy