Scaling frugally: How we grew Reserv from 17 to 250 in one year

When we landed our first big account at Reserv, the excitement was palpable—but so was the pressure. As any entrepreneur will tell you, winning a client is just the start. What happens next—how well you can deliver—determines whether that win turns into something sustainable.

Early on, we committed to being a small, lean, efficient team. We didn’t—and never will—have an army of HR or IT staff, so the responsibility fell on me to figure out how to build scalable infrastructure that would enable a single person to run the back-office of an eventual 200-300 person company. 

I didn’t come from a traditional HR or IT background. My role at Reserv had always been strategy-focused, but from our inception, I found myself incubating multiple corporate functions: finance (managing payroll and our corporate treasury), compliance (getting employees and our legal entities the insurance licenses they needed and getting our SOC certification), IT (setting up our SSO, designing permissioning and privileging structure), and people (handling onboarding, terminations, training), to name just a few. It was a lot to juggle. But we had made one crucial decision early on that made all the difference: we chose infrastructure that could scale with us. 

One of the best pieces of advice I got was from a startup founder in Y Combinator, who told me to look into Rippling. By automating back office work that had been consuming my time—from setting up new hires with devices to handling payroll and managing benefits—I was able to step back and look at the bigger picture and dedicate time to honing Reserv’s mission with my teammates: what gaps and pain points do our customers really need help solving? Who is our ideal, sweet-spot customer? Where are real, high impact areas where we can drive meaningfully better outcomes for our customers?  

In fact, when we learned that we were finalists for an RFP that might require us to hire 40 people in 60 days, Rippling automating all the legwork gave the COO and me the mental bandwidth to build a talent acquisition strategy to have in place in the event we won this game-changing account. Instead of the traditional sequential hiring approach, we built a system for recruiting and onboarding in parallel, bringing on 40 people of different levels simultaneously over 60 days. It was an approach that fit our speed and was made possible by the automation and scalability built into our HR, finance, and compliance systems—with Rippling sitting at its core.

When we learned over the July 4 weekend that we’d won the RFP and had to execute our strategy, we were confident that the systems we’d put in place were ready to handle the increase—and we were right.

There are three things I took away from that experience that I would recommend to other leaders who want to scale fast and smart:

1. Prepare for the win before it comes. We didn’t know when our big break would arrive, but we made sure we had the infrastructure in place early on. That decision saved us when we had to scale quickly.

2. Work with partners who understand your needs. Rippling’s focus on running lean matched our own. They built a platform that fit the way we operated, which made all the difference when it was time to grow.

3. Don’t just plan for failure; plan for success. We spend a lot of time preparing for things to go wrong, but what happens when everything goes right? Your systems need to be able to scale with you when the big moment hits.

You can’t control when your moment will come, but you can control how prepared you are. The infrastructure choices you make today will either limit or unlock your ability to seize the opportunities that come your way.