As her team swelled to 30 employees, Juliana Oliveira knew something wasn’t right. In pursuit of working smarter, not just more, she streamlined her Dallas firm’s workflow, downsized her team and pushed herself to get picky about the work they took on—what she calls a “strategic realignment” in an effort to reframe her vision for growth.
After scaling up, you had a moment when it felt like the size of your team was actually holding the firm back. What happened?
I’ve always had that ambition of growing a big firm. We got to the point where we had 30 employees turning out 27 projects a year, and we got our own space in a high-rise. In the past year and a half, the growth the business experienced was exponential, to the point that everybody was feeling like they weren’t getting the love and attention they needed—and where it no longer felt like the kind of work-life balance I wanted for the team or for myself. I made the conscious decision to stabilize our workload, make sure that everybody feels supported and figure out how many people we really need on the team to manage the business that’s coming in.
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