Congrats. My wife and I built our infosec biz which now has a team of 40 and self funds. A few thoughts on going significantly beyond $1MM in my experience:
North of 1m I started focusing more on brand marketing. Think Red Bull and creating a feeling around your brand, what space you occupy in people’s minds and why. This kind of marketing is hard to measure and becomes more feasible as your budget expands.
Consider getting an excellent HR consultant to deal with complex issues that will emerge as the team expands. You haven’t seen it all.
Get a kick ass law firm on your side. You’ll need them for day to day and not so day to day stuff like asserting your trademark rights. As execs, get friendly with a partner at the firm and try to do the occasional lunch. They’ll be an amazing source of network and a counselor when you get your first offer for acquisition.
Get a great firm of accountants, even if you do your own books. They’ll also be excellent advisors.
Try to promote internally and invest in your team with education allowances and subsidies. Once your business is humming, your existing people know the customer, product and culture. This has worked extremely well for us.
Avoid hiring a “seasoned executive” or manager. They bring little value, will only give you a sense of comfort and are very expensive.
Assemble a leadership team of trusted lieutenants and get good at trusting and delegating.
Learn as leaders (talking to the founders) that you aren’t one of the team anymore. You’ll learn this the first time you walk up to your crew at a conference as you see them happily chatting with each other, and as they see you they’ll stop and all eyes will turn to you. Then you’ll pretend you just came over to say hi and were going to sit somewhere else. And you’ll go sit somewhere else because you don’t want to interfere with the important team bonding that is happening.
Say no to your first few acquisition offers. You’re bootstrapped and cash flow positive which is lightning in a bottle. Congrats!! You can always say yes later.
Don’t feel insecure about just repeating the things that work, but at larger scale, all the way to 9 figures. Business is surprisingly basic.
Don’t take funding if you can avoid it. You’ll be amateurs entering the ring with prize fighters who negotiate funding deals every day and you’ll regret it on many levels. Focus the energy on growing that cash flow and use that for funding.
Build a war chest that’ll carry you for 6 months without layoffs if your revenue completely stops. This will take a few years.
Monitor your cashflow religiously and get good at predicting expected performance so that you can catch slow downs early and react soon. Early detection is key. When your revenue dips, don’t panic and make the hard calls fast.
Congrats again and you can DM me on Twitter @mmaunder if you have specific questions e.g want supplier recommendations.
Best of luck.
~Mark