Start-up scaling: challenges and measures for scale

Scaling is one of the challenges that every start-up and growing companies faces in their journey. It is important for any business to shift the gears in the right time. Scaling a business is an important part of growth, but it’s easy to make mistakes.

Any start-up or small business start with a people of ten, and being a family. From 30 to 50 you go from being a family to being a company, and everything starts to get really hard. With less than 30 people, everyone knows each other well enough to strike up a conversation with practically anyone and the priorities are clear because everyone’s talking about them all the time. At 50 people, everything that used to come naturally becomes a struggle. People suddenly complain that they don’t know what’s going on anymore. They don’t know why you’re making certain decisions. They don’t know what they should be doing.

UK Based serial entrepreneur Erik Fairbairn says “Each time your business doubles everything seems to break; your sales process, finance processes, management information flow, so every time your company doubles in size, you end up re-designing every process you have.”

 The scaling involves different challenges for a start-up:

• Scaling Shifts Your Team’s Focus - Choosing the wrong people to work with may shift the focus
• It is an expensive effort - The bigger your business gets, the more expensive everything will be.
• You’re not going to be able to move as quickly or as aggressively as you’d planned.
• Scaling ahead of revenues
• Management structures as growth occurs
• You cannot manage what you cannot measure
• Retaining the culture that made you exceptional to start with
• Recruiting the correct people

The following measures shall be taken in order to smoothen the process of scaling and overcome the scaling challenges.

• Be careful not to let your costs scale faster than your revenue
• Keeping organizational overhead low so people can continue to make decisions and execute
• Build a repeatable customer process, from understanding a sales process or conversion funnel – A Good CRM practices in the business
• Build a solid infrastructure of systems
• Raise an appropriate amount of capital to support the generally inevitable cash-flow needed for the strategic scaling
• Consistently honor and prepare the team to be focused on execution as the business moves on different phases
• Defining and Implementing the culture to each and every corner will limit or reduce the feeling of change
• Well hiring by focusing on quality, not to rush hiring someone to fill seat. And firing also go in hand to maintain the quality since not everyone will be a perfect fit for business
• It is very important to build a core leadership team which flourish the rest of the team by not underestimating the roles