In this second in the series of posts exploring scaling the business, let’s look the differences between growing the business versus scaling the business. What better source of authoritative information than this piece from the Growth Institute.
There are some fantastic insights in this piece. Here are just three of them:
- Companies that scale successfully don’t set out to grow their business, they build it for scale from the outset
- A scaling company grows at twice the industry average but its expenses are roughly the same
- When I was at business school, a company’s growth was a series of steps, where you go through a plateau period before you slingshot up the next level. Nowadays the scaling curve is a series of ‘valleys of death’ through which each company must pass in order to dominate its industry
The Growth Institute identifies four scaling stages:
- Start-up
- Grow-up
- Scale-up (these three are similar to the three I talk about in my ‘scaling the business’ post)
- Dominate
The percentages of companies that make it through each of these stages are horrifically small, so if you’ve got scale-up ambitions it’s important to go in eyes wide open, and also read the Growth Institute piece, and the ‘how to navigate’ guide, in more detail.
Paul Dilger's blog 