Scale up roadmap

Before you even start growing to a scaleup, you have to know where your company stands right now. Are you still too much of a startup, or do you have bigger plans than just scaling up? The starting point should be to do a self-assessment. If you don’t know where you are right now, you don’t have a good starting point for future developments. The first step of the scale up roadmap is to know what lies ahead and what aspects need the most attention.

Some important ones are:

• Team size
• Years of existence
• Revenue
• Amount of products/services launched
• Countries with a point of sale
• Strategy and purpose
• Organizational structure
• Growth focus area

If most of these things check out for you, then you are ready to scale up. Are you not sure if you are ready to scale? Book a free meeting and talk us through your challenges or do the ‘am I ready to scale’ questionnaire.

Now that you know if you are ready to scale or not, it’s time to look even deeper into your company. The second step of the scale up roadmap is to get a clear view of your vision and mission status. Does everyone who works for you know the shared vision and mission? Does everyone feel like this is still up to date? Does it correspond with what you are trying to achieve in the future? Next to this, your ambition as a future scaleup is vital too. To make it to the big leagues, you have to shoot for the stars. Your vision, mission, and ambition have to be in sync and mean something to everyone on the team. After all, the whole team has to bring that vision, mission, and ambition to life. If this is not up to date yet, don’t worry, in ‘commit to growth’, we will highlight how they fit into your strategy. To read more about vision and mission, check out this article.

These aspects are about how you work from inside your company to make an impact on the outside. The following are about outside influences that affect how you work inside your company. This includes factors such as identifying your competitors and positioning of your brand. Have you had your eyes on the right competitors, or are new ones peeking around the corner? All crucial information to have when moving forwards toward a scaleup company. In relation to that, how do others perceive your positioning compared to your competitors? Is it clear that you offer something special or have an advantage? If not, this is something that you need to work on immediately. Not being special enough often can result in a failed approach towards reaching the scaleup phase.

Ultimately the overarching question is; what (as a business) do you stand for?

After self-reflecting comes turning around and looking outwards towards the horizon. Now is the time to truly define what you want to achieve as a scaleup company. Start by outlining or updating your vision, mission, and ambition. As mentioned in the previous topic, having a clear idea of what you stand for as a company is essential to reaching the scaleup phase. Make sure it resonates with everyone and is clear to understand, from the inside and outside.

Next thing is to work on outlining big overarching goals. Define your goals in a way that they contribute to reaching the vision, mission, and ambition. The entire organization should be able to visualize these and make an effort to work towards achieving them. Your set of goals shapes how your scaleup looks and should be in parallel to your strategy.

Reaching the scaleup status isn’t going to happen randomly and a real commitment to growth is needed. That’s why you can’t go without a strategy in order to reach your goals. Your strategy should include ambition, purpose, and reason to scale up. It should also include your focus areas, where to play, and how to win. Where strategy towards a scaleup differs from other strategies is that there has to be a strong focus on growing your infrastructure, organizational structure, resources, tools, etc. Identify what areas need the most attention and where you have to strive even further to make a difference and set yourself apart. To make everything as easy as possible and keep a high-level overview, try to fit everything on one piece of paper.

You most likely have the early adopters behind you, but how do you reach the early majority and even the late majority?

With your strategy and commitment to growth defined, our fourth step in the scale up roadmap is to involve your target audience. After all, their support has put you in the position to think about scaling up. The goal of becoming a scaleup could be to reach more of your target audience. Therefore, it’s crucial to test if the goals and strategies you determined correspond with your target audience. Is everything still in line with your initial appealing point? Are your vision and mission still reflected clearly, and can consumers see that? Do you stand for the same core values that you stood for in the beginning? Be sure not to lose that special thing that sets you apart from others and why your target audience engaged with you in the first place. Make sure they can still recognize themselves in all your scaleup plans. And if you really want to make sure you hit the right chord, involve them in the journey and bring them onboard.

All of this is assuming that you already have a strong connection to your target audience. Usually, in the case of a startup wanting to grow to a scaleup, you are looking to gain more ground in the market you have already entered and penetrate new ones. Reaching more people in more regions is a significant way of scaling. It’s a vital question of where do you want to play and who do you want to buy your products? Make sure you understand why you choose to operate in certain markets, geographical areas, and channels. With that knowledge, you can choose new and other ready markets.

There are many pitfalls when you are scaling your company. Failing to see and recognize opportunities is one of them. A winning mind state should extend to more than just looking at strategy. To grow to the next level, you shouldn’t be like everyone else and take the same route. Pay attention to trends in multiple fields of business; you never know where you may find inspiration. Look into the far future and think outside the box. How can you innovate? How can you capitalize on trends and opportunities? What is something that people won’t expect but is still very much within the ethos of your brand?

Your product itself, and its platform, have to be scalable in order for your company to scale. What we mean by this is that you have to be able to sell an exponential amount more of the desired product. Think about the production of your product. Is the product ready for mass production? Do you have enough production capability? What is the timeframe for deliveries? If you sell more products than you can produce, you won’t be able to serve your customers and grow.

Another aspect of this is the scalability of your platform. How do you sell your products? Do you have a well-functioning logistic infrastructure in place? Making more money influences your margins, are your product and platform designed with those margins in mind? We will touch base on more resources and financing later on.

A key characteristic of a scaleup company, and our seventh step of the scale up roadmap, is the ability to convince with a stellar marketing strategy. First, assess your current marketing strategy. Do you reach the desired amount of people? Is the appearance up to date with what you want to convince? It’s important to know where you stand right now, as you don’t want to put resources into a massive marketing strategy with outdated ideas. You likely have to think about growth marketing and putting together a growth hacking team to achieve substantial growth. This is a strategy aspiring scaleups can implement to boost engagement and reach. When entering new markets, this becomes even more vital. Most importantly, think about the overarching message you want to send and how your marketing corresponds with your positioning.

A crucial step in the scale up roadmap is evaluating your resources. As a scaleup, you’re working on a much bigger scale than as a startup, and with that come more resources. When scaling your company, this is crucial to making things work. Sadly a good idea goes nowhere without the tools and planning to execute it. Aspects to look at are:

• Financing
• Infrastructure
• Logistics
• Software
• Hardware
• Service
• Organizational structure

Optimizing and utilizing all of these resources allow you to scale your business. When you don’t, it becomes harder to grow without hiccups and roadblocks. If your operation is smooth, you don’t have to worry about that. If your online environment works flawlessly, another thing less to worry about. Your team of employees also has to be sufficient. While, in most cases, you want to work smarter and not harder, scaling means much more work. With this comes the expansion of your team and the need to hire more people. Both the already existing and new employees have to be ready to scale and have to be able to do their work with the right resources. New employees bring new capabilities, and alongside the right resources, this results in another step closer to becoming a scaleup.

Most resources don’t come cheap. That’s why you also need to pay attention to financing. Funding is essential to scale up. Growth costs a lot of money. Depending on your goals and aspirations, the cost may vary. At the same time, those goals and aspirations can help you get the investors you need. Because depending on your current financial situation, you might need external investors to help out. Things to look at are; revenue, cash flow, and reserves. If you decide to seek external investors, you need to present a convincing pitch deck. If you choose to do everything with internal finances, make sure you have the right people working for you. Exponential growth in sales and revenue can also result in the same amount of extra finance work.

Without a well-put-together team, you’ll never become a scaleup. With other steps in the scale up roadmap, there is still room for some error. But without your employees, there is no way you will be able to scale up. Step one is to secure the right people for the right job. Step two is making sure that everyone in their respective positions can work to handle the growth. It may be overwhelming for some people to hear what you expect from them in a few years’ time. Make it clear what their job is and what their responsibilities are. Finally, set boundaries and move away from everyone doing everything.

For a substantial part, becoming a scaleup company is all about leadership. This phase for your business brings new workflows, processes, and responsibilities. Make sure there is a solid foundation to build on. Think about strong communication, regular schedules, meetings, checkups, etc. This contributes to building a bigger organization.

Changing up the way you work requires a change in mindset and habits. Are you up for that challenge? Do you have the required experience for such a big task? It can help to bring in people from the outside to guide you through the entire process of scaling up. An adviser can bring forward other points of view, insights, and ideas you couldn’t have thought of yourself. Whatever route you decide to take, no matter what combination of decisions you make, it all depends on the execution of the plans.

Now that you know all the steps to transform into a scaleup company, you’ll have to execute your vision and set everything in motion. This last piece of the puzzle to the scale up roadmap requires you to identify what you need to reach the goals and strategy you’ve set out to accomplish. You need to know how to implement all your desired changes. You also must not forget that this is a long process. To achieve success, you should work on your vision every single day. By outlining a timeline and taking small steps at a time, eventually, you’ll get to that spot on the horizon. The reality is that you have to work hard, together as an organization, to reach your goals. Set deadlines, finish projects, and close every period properly. Track your progress along the way and evaluate.

Bringing in external help in this phase of the scale up roadmap can help you focus more on working than executing.