Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle… when the sun comes up, you’d better be running. - Author unknown

In the 1980s David Birch defined the fastest growing companies as gazelles, and set some threshold definitions for what makes a gazelle. A business gazelle grows at least 20% per year over a four-year period with sales of at least $100,000. By this definition, less than 3% of companies in the US are gazelles.  Another critical characteristic of gazelles is that they are not normally the new sexy technology that the world has never seen. Normally they are companies who have entered traditional industries with a new mindset; a new delivery model and have the agility to execute it, despite have very large well established competitors in the space.

The most significant issue with being a gazelle is remaining one! How do you continue to grow in leaps and bounds over long periods of time? How do you maintain your agility – how does an increasingly larger company continue to respond quickly to an ever-changing business environment with the same velocity and innovation? These factors create what Birch describes as a psychological environment of continual terror – a fear that the growth will stop, that we won’t be able to manage it, and that we will lose our agility.

Two other things generally keep gazelle managers up at night, and they both have to do with potential shortages – capital and talent. High-growth companies need plenty of both on a near-continual basis. And while venture firms hope that their investments will become gazelles, most gazelles don’t get any venture capital money at all.

Recruiting Talent within Gazelles

What does being a gazelle really mean for recruiting talent? Getting enough of the right people in the right jobs is a challenge. Not only do we need a volume of people as we grow quickly, but our growth often demands new, sometimes specialized skills that we haven’t traditionally had in-house. These people have to be highly skilled yet flexible within our agile organization. Most importantly they have to have an entrepreneurial mindset in order to succeed at any gazelle.  As you can imagine, these types of people are in limited supply.  Most come from larger companies and are not used to the speed in which decisions are made or the lack of “extra” support they’ve become accustomed too in large bureaucracies.  These people are really hard to find, but once you have those people, it’s critical to retain them.

On a personal level, ZeroChaos has experienced much of this first hand. It’s been difficult as we’ve grown so large so quickly that I simply can’t know all the employees personally anymore. It’s only in the last three years that I walk the halls and not know every person I see. Add in our recent strategic acquisitions and our global reach, and you can imagine how it’s just not possible any longer. I still attempt to know as many as I can and be accessible to all of them, but I’ve come to learn that I’m not going to know them all by their first names anymore.

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