Business Advice
What matters is recognising when the opportunity is there and understanding what that next stage requires from the business. Sometimes companies spend years refining their offer or finding their place in the market before the opportunity to scale becomes clear.
The strongest businesses we saw had reached the point where growth was no longer simply happening to them. They had identified an opportunity and made a conscious decision to pursue it.
2 Successful scale-ups need a driving force
There was a real passion behind the strongest businesses we met.
Scaling is rarely something that happens by committee. Usually there is an individual or a small leadership team with the ambition and determination to push the business forward.
That also requires an appetite for risk. Genuine scale often involves a leap of faith, for example taking on additional borrowing, investing in new premises, buying equipment or recruiting people before all the extra revenue has arrived.
Those decisions are never completely comfortable. But the scale-up leaders we met were prepared to make them because they believed strongly enough in where the business could get to.
3 Find your niche and then commit to it
A clear sense of direction tended to emerge once businesses had really understood where their strongest opportunity lay.
That does not necessarily happen on day one. Businesses can take wrong turns, experiment with different markets and learn lessons along the way. The important thing is recognising when you have found the product, service or niche that gives you a genuine platform for growth.
A scale-up journey is not necessarily a straight line. Successful businesses find a strong niche, a product with real potential and a way of operating that they can take confidently to market. Once that opportunity becomes clear, successful scale-ups are prepared to double down on it.
4 The leader cannot do it alone
Strong leadership matters, but so does having the right people around that leader. One thing I noticed among the most impressive businesses was a willingness from leaders to give credit to the team around them. They may provide the vision and energy, but they recognise they cannot execute the plan alone.
That becomes increasingly important as a business scales. The founder or chief executive cannot continue to be involved in every decision, customer conversation or operational detail.
You need capable people who understand the vision and can turn it into action. In many ways, building that team is just as important as having the original ambition to grow.
5 Design the business for where you want to be next
The best scale-ups design the growth journey. That means thinking ahead about people, processes, products, systems and physical capacity, rather than waiting until the business reaches breaking point.
One of the clearest examples from the judging process was seeing businesses investing in infrastructure with significant room to grow. The thinking was not simply about what they needed today, but what the business might require at the next stage and the stage after that.
That is the difference between accidental growth and deliberate growth.
Successful scaling requires a business to design its operating model so it has the capacity to absorb growth rather than constantly playing catch-up with it.
6. Expect bumps in the road and build the right support around you
No scale-up journey runs perfectly to plan.
The strongest businesses recognise that there will be mistakes, unexpected challenges and periods when things do not work out as intended. What matters is having the resilience to address those problems, learn from them and keep moving.
Experience helps, as does surrounding yourself with people who can provide the right advice at the right moment.
That includes the management team. but also the wider network of lawyers, accountants, funders and other advisers supporting the business. As companies scale, the challenges inevitably become more complex. Having trusted advisers who understand the business and its ambitions can give leaders greater confidence to make those bigger decisions.
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