Uniplaces founder has learned how not to communicate with employees as his company grows from 1 to 100

• Ben Grech is one of three founders of Uniplaces, a Lisbon-based startup that helps students find accommodation in Europe.
• Grech has noticed that as the company has grown, the way he and other leaders communicate with the team has changed, as the informal approach of a young company doesn't scale.
• Organic growth is the focus for the company right now, though Grech does not rule out acquisition or IPO down the line.
• This article is part of a series on growing a small business, called "From 1 to 100."

Fatherhood drove Ben Grech to make the decision to step down from his CEO job.

He was Uniplaces' CEO from its launch in 2011 up until April 2018, when he made the change to nonexecutive chairman. "It definitely helps not being in the CEO shoes and being a father because that is another thing," Grech said.

Grech is one of the three founders of the Lisbon-based startup, which has built a platform that helps students to find housing across Europe. There are over 100,000 rooms on the platform, and 4 million prospective tenants visit Uniplaces site every year.

Indeed, the business has come a long way since its days as a scrappy startup.

In his role as nonexecutive chairman, Grech is looking at acquisition opportunities as well as advising the CEO, Cyril Jessua, a Groupon veteran. "It's more sort of corporate development, if you want to put a title on it," he said.

During his time as CEO, he helped the company as it grew from a relatively small-room listings site to a leading student-accommodation marketplace with 100 employees.

Grech has always had an interest in business. He studied finance at Nottingham University and graduated with a first-class degree. While at university, he founded the Nottingham Entrepreneurs with the aim of providing networking and skills development to entrepreneurial students.

When he graduated in 2010, he joined the private-equity firm HIG Capital as an associate. But after a year he left to pursue Uniplaces full time.

Bigger team, bigger risk of mixed messages

As the company has grown, Grech said he's had to rethink how to communicate with a larger, layered team. The informality that may work well in a small startup doesn't translate when new management roles emerge.

"When you hire professional managers running the ops team, running the finance team, running the marketing team, you have got to be really careful not to also inadvertently undermine those people," Grech said.

When a company has 10 employees, it's relatively easy to make sure everyone has the same information and priorities, but it's much more complicated as the organization grows.

"When you're young company of 10 people, you're talking to each other all the time," Grech said. "Then when you're 100 people, you sort of do the same."

"But then the manager of that team will say, 'be careful not to give mixed messages to those people,'" he said. "So you've got to be a lot more structured and thoughtful about your communication."

Focused on new cities, organic growth

Uniplaces says it plans to continue growing at a fast rate, doubling or even tripling in size by the end of 2021.

"A big focus for the team at the moment is expanding out to new cities around Europe," Grech added. "When people see us or use us in Spain and they're from Poland, they start saying, 'When are you coming to Poland?'"

When asked about the prospect of Uniplaces being acquired, Grech said there are larger companies looking at the student-accommodation market and thinking about how they can grow, but he tempered expectations of any imminent deals.

He said being acquired "is a realistic option," but he doesn't think it's "necessarily going to happen in the next couple of years."

For now, Grech said the company is focused on organic growth.

"It's about staying private and growing and building out our business," Grech added, "and maybe in the future there might be an IPO or something, but I think that's still a bit far down the line."

Grech is an investor in other business opportunities, and he has developed a particular view on what a startup needs to deliver success.

"To spot a great opportunity and execute fast enough to create a company with market-leadership potential, you need a team right from the start," he said. "In my experience the team should come before the idea. Many people wait for the idea first - and never do anything as a result."