From Startup to Scale-up

NM INSIGHT
Nov 8 · 4 min read

“A scale-up is a company that starts with more than 10 employees and increases it’s staff or revenue by at least 20% annually for three years.”

Scale-up is a fairly new concept in the world of startups. With the high failure rate of startups all over the world, the word “scale-up” has helped differentiate scalable and sustainable businesses from the rest. To make it simple, you could think of scale-ups as “established” startups.

The shift from the startup age to the scale-up age doesn’t happen overnight. It requires executive skills and a new mindset. A company qualifies as a scaleup after it overcomes all the early-stage barriers, shows high growth rate, and demonstrates a potential for enduring success. The scale-up stage comes when the startup tries to unlock new growth opportunities by accessing new markets, expanding its hierarchy and building upon its core strengths.

The question that arise here is, whether your business is viable for scaling or not?
The harsh truth is that for every stunning success story, there are countless failed stories. Unfortunately, many startups simply dwindle before they make any difference in the market. Some of the reasons for this include no liquidity, product-market misalignment, mismanagement in the team, and many more. So, before thinking about scaling your business, you must make sure that your business has a solid foundation and is all geared up to grow.

Here are a few ways by which you can turn your startup into a scale-up :

  1. Product-Market Fit

Your product-market fit is achieved when your product meets your ideal customer’s needs and does better than their alternative options. As a startup, you’re still experimenting with this fit by refining your buyer choices, developing your market value proposition and establishing a baseline for your business. A scaled up company has mastered all of this to the point of being able to confidently execute everything on a larger scale without sacrificing their current niche for the sake of growth.

2. Secure Funding and Generate a Steady Revenue Stream

Mostly, the scale-ups have made it into later rounds of Venture Capital funding (Series B and later) and have started generating their own revenue streams. With product-market fit established and solid funding, scale-ups can shift to a bigger operation while knowing their expected return on this new investment.

3. Team Member Roles

As your startup transitions to a scale-up, it is important to narrow team roles. Whether that means turning your sales and marketing person into two separate departments or hiring specialists for each role within those departments, scale-ups must focus on enhanced delegation in pursuit of growth

4. Outsource Non-essentials

The big corporations have got in-house graphic designers, developers, conversion optimizers, SEOs, CPAs, lawyers, and even janitors.

Most startups can’t afford that luxury so you’ll need to outsource all non-essential roles. You just need to focus on what you’re good at. This lean approach is what allows a startup to break into the big time. When you’re nailing it with your core competencies, you’ll start to scale up.

5. Keep an Eye on Social Media

Every new startup is in the public eye. Social media promotions play a major role in the early days of your startup. But, whatever happens on social media is examined by the world.

It’s important for you to watch your social media carefully. Scalability is about surviving as much as it is about growing. If you hit a PR fiasco, you’re limiting your chance of survival and scalability.

We at Insight believe in turning all your dreams into reality.

Introducing the journey from innovation to an empire: Planet B

Planet-B is a business plan competition with a 2 month timeline where the participants are provided with online training sessions and one to one mentor-ship. Planet-B also helps in providing a platform to idea and early age startups to pitch their ideas in front of leading venture capitalists, angel investors, incubators and accelerators.

This year, the competition is categorized into 2 categories-

1) Planet-B idea track for idea stage startups.

2) Planet- B startup track for startups that have been incorporated for less than 2 years.

Make a strong and memorable first impression with heavy hitters in the industry and they may provide crowdfunding and constructive foundation in the longer term which could open more doors for your business.

Planet B gives your venture the perfect platform to introduce yourself into the corporate world, it is a competition which will transform your vision into reality.

Registrations opening soon!

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