The Growth Stage: From Start-up to Scale-up" loading="lazy">
If you’ve rubbed elbows with a sufficient number of small business owners, you will notice that a lot of them, if not even all of them, tend to think of their business as their own child. They are so attached to it and so devoted to it that you would think the entire thing came out of their womb. Then again, who can blame them? When you have toiled hard to create something out of nothing, and it succeeds, becoming something bigger than you ever imagined it could, wouldn’t you dote on it as well?
It is a proud moment, when you finally see your small business scaling up. However, after the surge of pride comes the realization that expanding a small business will get a bit more complicated from that point.
A business scaling up means that your efforts and resources must scale up as well. That’s where it gets a bit hard because in expanding a small business, there are some aspects that get harder to control as you deal with your business growing bigger.
So how do you make sure that the growth of your business will not outrun your efforts and your resources?
In this article, we’ll talk about what to expect in the growth stage of business, and how small business owners can cope as they deal with their business scaling up.
The Growth Stage
In the Success Stage of Small Business Growth, the small business owner faces two choices: step-back, or expand. Should the choice fall on the latter, they then transition into the Growth Stage, also known as the scale-up phase in the stages of small business growth. The Growth Stage is characterized by excess cash flow, increase in revenue, less turnovers, growth in market share and customer base, and ultimately, rapid growth in every other aspect– it is the golden age of your business, so to speak.
It can be an exciting but a very unpredictable time, expanding a small business. You might be wondering what to expect in the growth stage of business, if such is the case, then you’ve come to the right place. As you wade through the surge of rapid growth, there are known mistakes that you must avoid making. What are these mistakes?
Read on and find out!
The Dangers of the Omnipotence and the Omniscience Syndrome
We have established that you have no idea what to expect in the growth stage of business, so it’s important that you at least know about the most common dangers most business owners fall into, so you know how to evade them.
Omnipotence Syndrome. This refers to a feeling or a sense of being “too powerful and capable of everything”. Put into the context of expanding a small business, the Omnipotence Syndrome is said to afflict the business owner when he/she believes him/herself capable of everything; that he/she insists on expanding and growing the business really fast before they’re ready, and then end up losing a lot of cash or worse, running out of it eventually.
Omniscience Syndrome. This refers to a feeling or sense of being knowledgeable about everything. In the context of growth in business, given that expanding a small business results in a more complex operation, bringing in more people to assist in running the growing business would require the owner to delegate his/her previous duties to the new people. The Omniscience Syndrome is said to afflict business owners when they take themselves to be all knowing that they cannot simply entrust and delegate some work to the new people they hired, so they end up sabotaging their own company’s growth by insisting on doing it all - failing to keep up with the rapid growth.
Tips for (previously) Small Business Owners in the Growth Stage
Tip #1 Rein in Growth. Sure, you have chosen to expand. Growth is an exciting time, but make certain adjustments in the goals you work so hard towards so that you never outpace your assets, your resources, and the development of the systems you have in place. Business growth can only be truly achieved when your capacity to service this “growth” also grows. So as your business scales up, match this growth with a more developed system in place, increased assets, and better resources to service that growth.
Tip #2 Learn to Delegate and Trust People. Do not fall into the Omnipresent and Omniscient Syndrome. Do not ever assume that only you can be capable of running your business, and that only you know what to do in every situation involving your company. Hire quality people, and learn to trust them. Keep in mind that although you are the one who got your company to this point of remarkable growth, it may need the skills and knowledge other people have in order for it to keep growing.
Tip #3 Have Reasonable Goals. It’s always good to reach for the stars, but when you own a business, and this business is finally scaling up, you have A LOT to lose. You cannot play aggressively all the time. Have goals, but make them reasonable ones. This way you can continue to expand without losing focus and losing capital.
Final Take: Start up to Scale-up
Now you know what to expect in the growth stage of business. Growth is an exciting time in an entrepreneur’s life, and yet it is filled with traps they can fall into should they fail to discern the steps they take. When done right, however, the Growth Stage is where a small business completes its evolution into a bigger business.
This is a crucial point where one wrong move can push a business scaling up a few steps back. From the Growth Stage, you can go back to the survival stage. This makes it really important that small business owners who decide on expanding a small business, be able to let go of their “baby”, and allow it to be transformed fully under the watch of people they hired to help it grow.
