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Any entrepreneur worth his or her salt wants their business to grow. It goes without saying. And for all sorts of reasons: it gives you a sense of progress and purpose; it throws up lots of new challenges; it helps you attract and retain better people; and – let's be honest here – it puts money in the bank and makes people sit up and take notice. The way I see it: if you start a business, you have to want to make it big, a business that people know and respect. Or you're not really an entrepreneur - you're just doing it as a lifestyle choice.

On the other hand, growth is also a major hassle. It really is. Half the time you don't entirely know what you're doing. It's incredibly difficult to plan resources in advance - you've usually either got too few people or too many people, too much space or too little space. Job specs are changing all the time, so you end up with people who outlive their usefulness (or turn out not to have any). You suddenly find that you don't know some of the people that work for you, or that you don't actually like them much. And as all this happens, it's very easy for the wheels to fall off.
 
For us, the tipping point came somewhere around the time we hired our 20th member of staff. It wasn't him personally, you understand (even if he did have a dubious predilection for red jeans). It was just a size thing: one day we were a team of people who all worked together, argued together and went out together afterwards - and then almost overnight it all seemed to change. Office politics suddenly reared its ugly head. People started retreating into little cliques. For someone as nosy as me, it was incredibly aggravating to realise suddenly that I wasn't fully acquainted with everyone else's business. Suddenly, our office wasn't such a nice place to work - and not surprisingly, results started to suffer.

The answer, believe it or not, turned out to be simple: values. Now I promise you: I'm about as sceptical about this kind of gung-ho corporate nonsense as it's humanly possible to be. In the past I used to have to stifle my gag reflex when I heard people banging on about missions and visions and unique DNA. I always thought values were the kind of thing marketing departments dreamt up to make themselves feel important, used by CEOs to persuade themselves that they weren’t really identical to all their rivals. But one of my advisers was a big fan of the idea, so eventually I decided to give it a go.
 
It was a painful process – to start with, everyone clearly thought it was a stupid idea (including me). But eventually, after several hours of arguing (during which I had to persuade one enthusiastic soul that 'win at all costs' wasn't really suitable for this kind of thing), we managed to come up with five qualities that we wanted the company to have. And these five values have been the cornerstone of the business ever since – they're on the walls, they're in all our presentations, we talk about them on a weekly basis. I've even stopped feeling embarrassed about the idea now - in fact, I'd say it's the cheesiest thing I've ever come to embrace passionately (well, in a business sense, anyway).
 
The idea is that these five values not only keep the current lot on the same page, but also explain to new people what we're all about. When you've got 10 people, they can work this out quickly enough for themselves - with 20, they might need a little help. It works for us, so presumably it will work for others too. And at the very least it should make your marketing person feel important.

Previous Secret Diary entries:
25.07.08: About Me
01.08.08: Bad debts
08.08.08: Partnership troubles
15.07.08: Dealing with difficult people
22.07.08: HR Therapy