Scaling from 5 to 50 employees

Hire well, meet your employer obligations, document how work gets done and lead a team that can run without you.

Who it is for: Owners of growing Australian businesses who are moving from doing the work to building and leading a team.

Intermediate · 8 articles · about 66 minutes

What you will learn

  • Run a fair, repeatable hiring process
  • Meet employment, payroll and super obligations under Fair Work and the ATO
  • Onboard new staff so they are productive quickly
  • Manage performance and give useful feedback
  • Document processes so quality does not depend on you
  • Build a culture that keeps good people

Articles in this path

  • Hiring and recruitment – How to work out what role you actually need, write an ad that attracts the right people, run a fair and fast selection process, and make an offer that sticks: a practical hiring guide for small Australian businesses.
  • Employment fundamentals – The Australian employment basics every employer must understand: the Fair Work system, National Employment Standards, modern awards, employment types, contracts, record-keeping and the difference between an employee and a contractor.
  • Employee onboarding – A new hire’s first 90 days decide whether they stay and how quickly they become productive. How to plan the week before they start, their first day, their first month and their probation review so that both sides succeed.
  • Payroll and workforce management – Paying people correctly and on time is a legal duty and a trust issue. How Australian payroll works end to end: awards, timesheets, Single Touch Payroll, superannuation, leave, rostering and the systems that keep it accurate as the team grows.
  • Performance management – Performance management is a continuous cycle of clear expectations, regular feedback and fair consequences, not an annual form. How to set it up in a small team, handle underperformance properly, and recognise good work.
  • Leadership and team management – Moving from doing the work to leading people who do it is the hardest transition in small business. How to set direction, delegate properly, run useful meetings, build your first supervisors and manage your own time as the team grows.
  • Standard operating procedures (SOPs) – What an SOP is, when a task deserves one, how to write one people will actually follow, and how to keep a small library of procedures current without drowning in documents.
  • Workplace culture – Culture is what people do when the owner is not watching. How to define the values and behaviours you actually want, hire and manage to them, build psychological safety and meet your obligations for a safe and respectful workplace.

Next path: Digitising your business