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?
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