The Hive Watch Playbook: Scaling from 25 to 65 Employees While Maintaining Culture
Tripling your team size in under a year is challenging enough. Doing it while building diversity in a traditionally homogeneous industry, maintaining near-zero turnover, and managing a distributed workforce across 14 states? That’s the kind of scaling story worth studying. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Hive Watch founder Ryan Schonfeld shared their approach to this complex challenge.
Rapid Growth Without Cultural Compromise
“We’ve gone from 25 people at the end of last year to 65 plus people this year,” Ryan reveals. More impressively, they’ve achieved this while maintaining what he describes as “almost no turnover in the business.” This stability during rapid scaling hints at deeper cultural strengths.
Breaking Industry Patterns
The physical security industry isn’t known for diversity or innovation in workplace culture. Yet Hive Watch has built what Ryan calls “one of the most diverse companies in our industry” – a achievement that required deliberately breaking from traditional hiring and cultural patterns.
The Hybrid Approach to Team Building
Rather than forcing everyone into a single work model, Hive Watch created a flexible structure. “We have an office in LA. The people who are in LA are hybrid, but we do have employees in 14 or 15 other states as well who are fully remote,” Ryan explains. This flexibility has expanded their talent pool while maintaining cohesion.
Beyond Virtual Connection
Remote work doesn’t mean isolated work. As Ryan notes, “Even with fully remote employees, get together in person periodically for collaboration, and they don’t come here just to come sit in the office. There’s cross functional events for teams and interdepartmental things for teams to work together when we get people together.”
Culture Through Common Purpose
What drives this cohesion? Ryan emphasizes their shared mission: “Our feeling is that our product is a critical piece of software that is in real time helping protect people and our customers 24/7.” This sense of purpose helps align teams across geographical boundaries.
The People-First Philosophy
When asked what excites him most about the work, Ryan’s answer is immediate: “Our people would be number one.” He elaborates that they have “an unbelievable team of not just very professionally talented people, but just really good people.”
This focus on character alongside competence has created what Ryan describes as a self-evident culture: “Anybody who works here, I think it kind of speaks for itself.”
Key Lessons for Scaling Teams
- Diversity requires intention, especially in traditionally homogeneous industries
- Remote work can enable diversity by expanding talent pools
- In-person collaboration should be purposeful, not performative
- Culture manifests through how people work, not just where they work
- Rapid growth doesn’t have to come at the cost of retention
For founders scaling teams in traditional industries, Hive Watch’s experience offers a valuable template. Their success shows that it’s possible to maintain culture through rapid growth while simultaneously transforming industry norms around diversity and work models.
The key seems to lie in being intentional about culture without being rigid about its implementation. As they’ve demonstrated, you can build one of the most diverse teams in your industry while spanning 14 states – if you’re clear about your values and flexible about how to implement them.