Scaling any company's staff / team is probably one of the hardest things that any business owner needs to do. I think this has become even more difficult & complicated recently, since it is really difficult to find quality, technical skills that are still affordable.
As an example... At Woo, we recently had our hand forced a bit and have been necessitated to grow our support team. Drastically. I wouldn't say we've scaled our team and existing operations yet, but we're slowly getting there.
The surprising thing has however been the velocity at which we've had to scale & grow the WooTeam (view all of our pretty faces here). Here's a quick graph that I compiled to show how the WooTeam has grown in the last 39 months (July '08 - October '11):
[caption id="attachment_1157530488" align="alignright" width="640" caption="The Growth of the WooTeam (July 2008 - October 2011)"]
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What this shows is in the first 32 months, we grew to 10 “full-time” employees. In the last 8 months, we’ve added 7 new members, growing by 70%. So the velocity of our growth has definitely increased significantly recently as we've attempted to grow the business & our team.
Scary, but exciting. :)