After long, painstaking effort, people are finally buying the product or service you're selling. Congratulations, you are one of a few startups who have officially acheived the mythical product/market fit!
Now that your team has succeeded in building a product or service that people want to buy, it' time to start building an organization that can scale the delivery of your offering quickly, and that people want to continue to invest their time and money into.
This means it's time to make the move from a startup to a scaleup.
Because the primary challenge and scarcest resource of a scaleup is fundamentally different than a startup, there are several key priorities that need to change if you are hoping to acheive expontential growth.
Moving from startup to scaleup involves revamping the roles of the founders and the overall focus of the business. This can often feel scary and difficult.
Let's adress some of the most common concerns and objections related to scaling up, and how we can help you address them.
Many founders are perfectly happy running what's often referred to as a lifestyle business or are simply less ambitious or more risk-averse by nature.
If you don't want to scale your business that is, of course, perfectly fine. The only thing I would suggest before you're off is to have a quick glance at the remaining concerns and objections just to make sure that it is actually ambition that's keeping you from scaling, and not a sense being unable to do so.
If clients are not throwing themselves at you and capital is still a scarse resource, your company might still be in the startup phase and your focus should remain on finding product/market fit.
However, if your sense of readiness is more closely associated with not being able to onboard as quick as you would like without the concern of a drop in quality or customer satisfaction, then we absolutely should have a talk about how insight can be better organized to facilitate more consistent quality across the organization.
It's common for founders to not have a formal job description, but rather an intuitive understanding of ones responsibilities (which usually involves everything that someone else isn't able to do) and a recognizable work load. Any changes to these could result in you being worse off.
If this is a concern, I'd invite you to have a chat about it. It's my experience that founders often feel guilty about spending too much time working in the business and not enough time working on the business, and a chat could help explore the possibilities of adjusting that without the organization or yourself suffering.
You might already be overloaded with delivering on milestones and keeping investors happy. How are you supposed to find the time to scale as well?
If inability to making scaling a priority is a pain point, I invite you to set aside 2 hours a week for a 1:1 chat. During that time we can contribute to the understanding of your business and what needs to change where in order to free up sufficent time to focus on scaling.
Unless you've been an integral part of a successful scaleup in the past, the steps involved in scaling up might not be intuitive to you. You might also be interested to know that a lot of founders often hold personality traits which makes it more difficult for them to scale efficiently by themselves.
We can help show you the steps involved in scaling up, making sure that you address the organizations
Unfortunately it's all too common for a business not to have clear Key Performance Indicators favouring working long term and shifting human capital towards structural capital.
Depending on the skillset of your board room and employees, you might have to spend some time educating the organization on the importance of insight management and we are here to give you the vocabulary, tools and confidence to do just that.
Ready to take the next step towards exponential and less painful growth?
Read more about our consulting services of take on our surveys to better understand where your business is at and its potential for improvement:
Many organizations have a substantial potential for improvement when it comes to a culture, guidelines and tools for managing and reusing insight.
The lack of proper insight management can quickly grow to become the primary obstacle an organization faces in growing more quickly all the while improving and maintaining uniform quality.
Here are some of the most common problems organizations are experiencing due to a lack of proactive insight management.
Insight is distributed across several channels, making it more difficult to relocate it when needed. Rules of where to store and share which types of insight are unwritten at best and unclear at worst.
Even experienced coworkers can typically spend 2-3 hours each week looking for information.
These are some of the channels used for insight, sorted here by a deminishing degree of reusability and refindability:
Insight and other types of deliverables are organized by client/vendor/department/project in a folder structure. The folder structure within each top level is somewhat uniform. Navigating to find what one needs takes time.
When reusing insight, people often need to know for which project there was previously done similiar work in order to find relevant material to copy.
Employees are uncertain as to whether the expectations of what to find where in the folder stucture are aligned across their coworkers.
Insight is posted over various channels with names roughly matching the names of clients/projects/departments.
Insight is posted as answers to various questions from clients, coworkers, partners, investors, etc.
Insights is shared orally when someone has a problem or a question related to their work.
Insight is rarely constructed to be reusable, and when it is, there is often an assumption of a pre-existing level of understanding that is not given for someone who is new to the team.
The organization lacks the knowledge and a uniform vocabulary to properly store insight in a format which makes it easily searchable, reusable and possible to track how the insight was reused.
The understanding of terms like
...is not uniform across employees.
As a result, insight expexted to be reused often ends up in Word or Excel format which makes it more difficult to find and reuse, as well as ensuring that the insight is actually being reused and improved.
It's more difficult than it needs to be to gain a detailed understanding of how the organization and its teams is expected to do it's work.
This makes it more difficult to present the company to new team members and investors, ensure compliance and improve and automate processes.
Due to the lack of easily reusable insight, management or more experienced employees are often dependant upon to assist with more complicated deliveries. This keeps these resources tied up in a delivery-loop, making it difficult to free up time to focus on working on (as apposed to in) the organization.
No person or team in the company is measured (implicitly of explicitly) on to which extend they produce or consume reusable insight. As a result, there are fewer incentives to prioritize short-term work over long-term work.
Employees often feel like they have to choose between spending time making insight reusable or spend the time completing the tasks their performance is actually measured in relation to.
Remote work
Work is more More specialized
Unfamiliar business models
NB. The phases don't occur once/are not limited to company stage.
Alternative naming of stages:
Can be visualized as a ladder signifying levels of insight maturity.
Starting with awareness (or lack thereof).
How does training fit into this?
Is it relevant to talk more clearly about capitalizing?
Status: Draft
Vi expect our insight to produce continously more clear expectations.
This applies to all coworkers.
By expecting our insight to consist of clear expectations we acheive several advantages:
https://alfstad-johansen.wecomplish.no/skillset/531