KEY PHASES OF A GROWING BUSINESS; Reviewing the long game of building a fortune company.

The backend of a business is like a contruction site of a superhighway connecting major cities. Such construction often takes off with blue prints discussed in boardrooms but preceded with multiple site surveys. Startups, regardless of size of initial capital begin here.

The main engineer in the project has the vision of how the superhighway will look like and what it will take to reach the summit. Engineers working under him concentrate on certain sections of the superhighway just as portfolio managers in business.

Road users continue to use the road or certain sections of it while the construction takes place. In building a startup, one needs to launch products to the market in phases and continuously improve those products and the process of producing and distributing them.

The initial stage comes with difficulty in mobilising funding and thus most businesses take time to scale from their immediate markets to emerging markets at the peripheral. This also creates a challenge in acquiring the best talent and retaining them in the business.

When one gets the product right - often through trials and errors in the market - the next big job is to beat competition and scale. Here, other than pricing slightly below market price, the game is always about quality, speed of execution (turn around time) and customer service.

Customer service is the best way to market your products to existing customers to earn repeat business and to get referrals from their networks. However, demand is largely driven by prices and quality. Therefore efforts must be concentrated at keeping prices low and quality high.

This is explained by a rational consumer's motive of maximizing utility from every goods purchased. Only one strategy works at this stage of business; invent, re - invent and repeat the process. The cost of innovation may however reduce your profit margins if not spread.

You'll therefore need to adopt a phased approach of implementing innovation strategies. To achieve this while keeping prices low, you may as well need to finance this growth stage from retained earnings of the business. This saves you the cost of debt interest.

When you finally have a recognized brand, loyal market for your products, control of a significant market share and freedom from shylocks; the business is in a cashcow phase. Here, you enjoy profits and stability but not scalability.

Giant brands keep on rebranding, finding new philosophies, going big on social responsibility and marketing aggressively. These techniques aim at creating permanence to their brand dominance. To scale at this stage; one must diversify to new products and territories.