Scaling Your Startup? Maintain Culture with These Initiatives!

Rapid growth is one of the biggest culture killers! Everyone’s so focused on hiring, onboarding and hitting targets that culture slips into the “we’ll deal with it later” box. Later never comes and before you know it, you’ve got silos, cliques and politics.

One thing I’ve found hugely effective with scaling clients is to lock in values early and make them practical, not pretty words on a wall. I worked with a SaaS business that doubled headcount in under 12 months. Instead of running “culture workshops” that would have been ignored the minute things got busy, we built values into daily processes.

That meant:

– Interview questions linked directly to values, so new hires were aligned from day one

– Probation reviews measured against “values in action” as well as performance

– Managers called out values when giving feedback, both positive and corrective

It worked because it wasn’t optional or bolted on; it was baked into how the business ran. New employees didn’t just hear about the culture, they experienced it through every interaction.

The result was that as the business scaled, it didn’t just hire people who could do the job, it hired people who fit how the job was done. That consistency kept the culture intact, even while doubling in size.

In my experience, the key is this: scaling doesn’t mean diluting. If you want your culture to survive hyper growth, you can’t leave it to chance or treat it like a side project. You’ve got to hard-wire it into the mechanics of how you recruit, manage and grow your people. That’s how you protect culture when everything else is moving at speed.

One initiative that helped keep our culture tight as we scaled was a three-minute, de-identified “Patient Minute” at the start of every all-hands meeting (and recorded for asynchronous viewing).

How it works (simple, repeatable):

A rotating presenter (radiologist advisor, CSM, or engineer) shares one real case: the problem – what we shipped – what changed for the patient/clinic.

One image or 30-second clip max; no vanity metrics.

We close with a values call-out (#PatientsFirst, #OwnTheOutcome) and 2-3 public kudos in Slack.

When you grow from 15 to 70 people across six time zones, culture drifts toward tickets and dashboards. “Patient Minute” re-anchors the room in why we build at all. It also creates shared context: the stroke CT we sped up, the rural site we unblocked, the feature that saved 35 minutes at 2 a.m. That story becomes the week’s shorthand—PMs reference it in specs, engineers quote it in code reviews, and CSMs reuse it in QBRs.

HIPAA/GDPR double-check on every clip; zero PHI. We use a Figma template (three slides), Loom for a 90-second recording, and archive each story in Notion so new hires can binge the last quarter in an hour.

Impact we measured (first 2 quarters):

eNPS +14 points and a 22% jump in “I see patient impact in my work” on pulse surveys.

Onboarding time -30% to first meaningful PR or customer touch—new teammates plug into real context faster.

The ritual surfaced two “small but mighty” ideas (patient-friendly report summaries; edge caching for rural sites) that drove measurable wins and became rallying points.

Pick one ritual that makes your values visible every week and keep it tiny and sacred. Give people a template, rotate presenters, and tie the story back to the backlog (“what’s the next tiny action this story demands?”). You don’t preserve culture with slogans; you preserve it by rehearsing it—consistently, in public, and tied to real work.

When our healthcare IT startup started doubling headcount, I realized culture couldn’t just live in values posters; it had to be practiced in the trenches. The pressure of HIPAA compliance, FHIR integrations, and nonstop enterprise demands meant mistakes were inevitable. What kept our culture intact was a practice we called Clinical-Grade Postmortems (CGPs).

Any serious incident, near miss, or value misstep triggered a 45-minute, blameless review. We borrowed from healthcare’s Just Culture framework, distinguishing human error from reckless behavior, and paired it with a system fix every time. Within 48 hours, we published a two-page Decision & Safety Log and assigned a single prevention action.

It sounds procedural, but here’s what it did for culture: it made ‘patient-first’ tangible, gave people psychological safety while keeping rigor, and reinforced purpose by closing the loop on prevention. Opening each session with a patient story and ending with kudos for the best prevention idea kept the human side alive.

Based on my analysis of similar situations at Flatiron Health and Aledade, codifying values into observable behaviors is what allows culture to scale. For us, CGPs became a living culture OS, part safety net, part teaching tool, and part recruiting filter. Candidates read our logs and saw our values in action before day one.

Looking back, I’d recommend this to any founder: pick one ritual that fuses your mission with daily operations. For us, CGPs turned compliance stress and scaling chaos into fuel for trust, learning, and resilience. In healthcare IT where mistakes carry real patient risk, consistency made all the difference.

When we began scaling rapidly, I found that involving our existing team members in the interview process was crucial for maintaining our culture. We transitioned from rushed hiring decisions to a more deliberate process where key team members participated in candidate interviews and specifically assessed for cultural alignment. This collaborative approach not only resulted in better hires who shared our values, but it also empowered our team by demonstrating that their perspectives on who joined our company mattered. The investment in this more thorough hiring process paid dividends through improved team cohesion and significantly reduced turnover.

When we were growing our startup, we focused on keeping a consistent company culture, especially with our remote team. But one thing that always seemed to work? Our mandatory ‘meet & greet’ sessions for our new hires. We wanted to make sure our team functioned like a team, regardless of distance and location. So, we had each of our team members connect with new hires in a one-on-one meeting (cameras and microphones on). This helped everyone connect personally right from the start. It made it easy for new team members to feel part of the community right away, while also letting our experienced staff give them a proper welcome. Along with our weekly check-ins and open communication channels, these one-on-one meet-and-greets helped keep our culture strong, even as we expanded quickly across different time zones.

We maintained culture by making storytelling part of scaling. As new people joined, we created a “customer win library” where team members shared short stories of problems solved and values in action. Reviewing those stories in all-hands meetings kept everyone connected to why we exist, not just what we do. It reinforced our culture through real examples rather than posters or slogans.

The survival of culture during hypergrowth periods depends on transforming cultural values into observable practices that people can witness in their daily work activities. I transform organizational values into 5 to 7 observable behaviors which team members can identify during meetings, code reviews, and client interactions before I incorporate these behaviors into performance evaluation systems and hiring criteria for actual practice. The system provides brief, targeted feedback to managers, which enables them to correct issues immediately instead of waiting for quarterly assessments.

The weekly “Show, Don’t Tell” session lasts thirty minutes to demonstrate team achievements. A team member demonstrates their recent achievement while explaining which behavior it demonstrated and what tradeoffs they made during the process. The recorded session receives tags for future onboarding purposes. The system maintains visible standards while teaching new employees and reduces their initial job-related stress.

At Market Your Architecture, we learned early that fast growth needs a strong culture. With experience from Dentsu Europe and scaling an agency to $250K/month, I knew growth could cause problems if people weren’t on the same page.

One thing we did was add a client impact first review after big projects. Everyone, no matter their job, shared how their work helped architects and AEC firms get more business. This kept the team focused on helping architects get leads even without referrals. It also made everyone responsible and gave them a sense of purpose, which strengthened our culture as we grew.

Maintaining culture while scaling quickly was one of the most challenging aspects of the journey at Carepatron. What helped most was making our purpose clear from the beginning: to make the lives of healthcare practitioners easier so they could focus on caring for their patients. During every all-hands, we reinforce that sense of accomplishment whenever we see growth push through, always connecting the numbers back to the impact on practitioners. It reminded the team that our work was reducing burnout, freeing up time, and supporting people on the front lines of healthcare. That shared sense of purpose has been the anchor of our culture and has allowed us to grow quickly without losing what makes the company meaningful.

At Franzy, rapid growth didn’t mean losing sight of our culture. One practice that’s worked really well is celebrating first deals as a team. Every time someone closes their first deal, we turn it into a full after-hours celebration with senior leadership present. It’s a simple gesture, but it reinforces our values, makes team members feel recognized, and keeps everyone connected as we scale. That consistency in celebrating wins early has helped us maintain a tight-knit, motivated culture even while growing fast.

The “Culture Fridays” initiative became an unexpected success for our team. The team members alternated between leading short sessions on their favorite topics and campaign roast sessions which included our own marketing efforts. The initiative began as a remote bonding activity yet evolved into a fundamental cultural practice. The program enabled team members to take charge of cultural development instead of relying on HR for this responsibility.

The new employee who organized a coffee order prediction game discovered that understanding team members’ coffee preferences created stronger connections than all the onboarding documentation combined.

The biggest blunder I see organizations making with regard to culture is not clearly defining it, keeping it as something abstract. So the most powerful step is simply to specifically identify what it is about your work environment that makes it special, that you want to be sure is not lost in spite of growth or new markets or even a downturn. Maybe it is your collaborative approach, your innovation style, your ability to grow people quickly, or your focus on flexibility and individuality. Maybe it is your ethics and integrity, your collective purpose-drive, your lack of silos.

It can help to crowd source this with employees if you are not sure what “it” is, which also has a side benefit of creating buy-in and engagement. Then, once you have named your culture differentiator, it is also helpful to define how it comes alive in your organization by listing out what behaviors confirm that it is alive and well and what behaviors or actions diminish it.

An optional but highly impactful next step is to broadcast it. On your website, in your lobby and conference rooms, on computer wallpaper. When people constantly see the culture by name, the culture is more clearly felt, absorbed, and acted upon, creating a self-reinforcing cycle.

Following this approach of define, document, display gives you a reference point for a codified “it factor” that you can then use to evaluate new initiatives against, make decisions that are true to who you are, and measure for effectiveness. This is especially effective during periods of rapid scaling, ensuring you stay true to your core identity during expansions and the related changes that come with them.

We scaled by keeping culture rooted in accountability. Every hire knew how their work connected to customer outcomes. One practice that worked was sharing real client feedback in team meetings—both praise and pain points. It reminded us why our work mattered and kept growth aligned with values. Culture held steady because everyone saw the direct impact of their efforts.

When scaling our startup, I found that implementing a “guru program” for the first 90 days helped us effectively introduce new talent to our company culture. This approach was based on my belief that, while talented professionals perform best when given autonomy rather than being micromanaged, the first 90 days of employment are when most adjustments take place. This policy has helped us retain exceptional talent by providing peer support while preserving our core value of trust even as we grew rapidly.

At HypeTribe, culture has always been the starting point. As we grew, we kept the same energy of collaboration and creativity in every project and every team. Scaling actually gave us more ways to showcase that vibe, so the culture became stronger as we added more people.

Something that’s worked really well for us is hosting tribe sessions. These are casual gatherings where we mix strategy with fun; sometimes it’s a workshop, other times it’s just a party or a chance to share what we’re working on. It keeps everyone connected, makes collaboration natural, and shows that culture is something we live, not just talk about.

We scaled up very quickly. But I also knew from the beginning that I really wanted to prioritize company culture. As a young entrepreneur with friends and colleagues working for all kinds of different companies, I had heard so much about how common it is for companies to not prioritize company culture, and I wanted to be different. So, in order to do that even while scaling up, I was intentional about keeping our weekly group bonding events. And I was constantly working alongside my team so that I could experience and encourage the culture personally.

Organizations that learn effectively achieve better scalability. I promote low-cost testing alongside open knowledge sharing to prevent curiosity from being suffocated by certainty. The documentation of learned insights helps teams avoid repeating the same painful experiences they have already encountered.

The team conducts two-way retrospectives following important work completion. The team should document unexpected events and identify which processes to maintain and which to modify along with their corresponding reasons. The team must consult a basic knowledge base which contains stored insights before starting new plans.

When CauseLabs was scaling rapidly, we prioritized maintaining our company culture by creating a robust onboarding process that focused on aligning new hires with our core values. We found that by explicitly incorporating our values into the hiring and training processes, new team members quickly understood what we stood for and how we operated. This alignment effort extended beyond people to include our strategies and marketing approaches, ensuring consistency across all aspects of our growing organization. The result was preservation of our brand authenticity and company culture even as we expanded into new markets.