June 26, 2019
With an estimate of over 300 million startups scattered all around the globe, it pays to understand that a startup and a scaleup is not in the same pot. A startup is in the early stages of staying alive in the market placeby securing funding and securing stability for their product in the competitive market, while a scaleup has already established their product and is accelerating their growth.
Bridging the wide gap between startup to scaleup is your regular David vs. Goliath scenario. Although difficult, it is achievable with the right steps and the correct mindset. Here are five ways to transition your startup to scaleup and upscale your business growth:
Establish your product in the market
A business is only as good as how strong your product fits into the market and it is imperative to ensure that your product meets your customers’ need. As a startup, you should have already experimented on tailoring your product to your buyers’ persona, developed your value proposition, and established your baseline to measure your business’ success.
Scaling up requires mastery of your product and knowing your customers behavior and needs better than they do themselves. As a startup progresses to scaling up their company, they can confidently execute everything on a larger scale without worrying about prior losses and threats- it’s all about building support to scaleup.
Build a proactive entrepreneurial culture
A proper scaleup needs leadership that inspires action and constant learning. Provide a management structure wherein your employees contribute more than their time and skills to the business.
A team of creators and unicorns is hard to come by if you’re not looking for them. Be smart to build a company filled with entrepreneurs that have an undying urge for learning and can tackle challenges head-on.
Invest in tech and innovative solutions
Assess your business needs and build your tech stack by investing more in technology that will help fuel your growth and drive your success. As a scaleup, your business has more to lose if you don’t put importance in ensuring that your company is in top form when it comes to business metrics.
Technology is paving the way into a more automated and smart solutions focused future. Put your business on the map by harnessing the power of technology and evaluate what specific tools your scaleup needs to promote growth.
Put a priority on automation
The global startup landscape is escalating rapidly with each day as new developments occur. If you want to jumpstart your growth focus on automating everything as much as you can. Replace systems that bog your employees down and open the floor for new ways to remove the hassle of dealing with repetitive tasks that waste energy that otherwise could be allotted for more important tasks.
As a scaleup you’re now in a position where automation is a priority as your business grows so does the load of your operations.
Seek out people who think differently than you
It comes as no surprise that it pays to occasionally butt heads over opinions and consider new ideas to mix the pot with. Having a diverse set of minds in a business provides tremendous value that should be encouraged and developed not criticized and shut out. Hire people who make you think twice about an idea but not enough to completely do away with it instead refine it by seeing it from a different angle- a scaleup doesn’t need people who can only say yes.
