Wondering How the Elite 0.4% Do It?
It’s a question that baffles many entrepreneurs: How do some businesses skyrocket past the elusive $10M revenue mark while the vast majority struggle to take off? The answer lies not in luck but in mastering the art of scaling through strategic growth stages.
Do these 2 steps to scale your company.
- Learn what stage of growth your company is currently at.
- Address all 5 critical areas responsible for growth.
Identify Your Growth Stage & Accelerate
Your business’s journey to $10M begins with understanding where you stand:
- Start-Up Phase (1-5 employees): You’re the heart, spearheading every initiative.
- Grow-Up Phase (6-15 employees): Focus shifts to boosting sales and building a winning team.
- Scale-Up Phase (16-250 employees): You’re leading leaders focusing on alignment and growth.
- Dominate Phase (250+ employees): You’re setting the pace, continuously innovating to lead the industry.
Why Focus on Team Size?
Simple: With every new team member, the complexity of managing, communicating, and scaling increases exponentially. It’s the people, not just the profits, that shape your journey.
Think back to when your company was just the founder, an assistant, and a plan on the back of a napkin. This start-up situation represents only 2 channels of communication (or degrees of complexity)
Add a third person (or customer or location or product) and the degree of complexity triples from 2 to 6.
Add a fourth, and it quadruples to 24. Expanding from 3 to 4 people grows the team by only 33%, yet increases complexity by up to 400%!
The Stages
Stage 1: Start-Up, usually 1 – 9 employees
You, the leader, are everything. You are the centre of the company and end up being a jack-of-all-trades.
– Focus: Product Development & Market Fit
– Priority: Validating the Business Model
– Barrier: Market Dynamics
– Ability: Marketing
– Decision: You, Your Leadership, Strategy
In the Start-Up stage, a company is in its infancy, focusing heavily on creating a product that fits the market needs
The main priority is validating the business model, ensuring that the product or service meets a real demand.
Market dynamics, such as competition and customer preferences, pose significant barriers.
The critical ability for a company at this stage is effective marketing to create awareness and interest in its offering.
Strategic decisions are crucial, setting the foundation for future growth
Stage 2: Grow Up, usually 6-15 employees
You are now a more focused leader. The company now depends on other people to execute their tasks.
– Focus: 100% on Sales
– Priority: Hiring the right team
– Barrier: Leadership
– Ability: Delegate, predict, repetitiveness
– Decision: You, Your Leadership, Team And Cash
At this stage, your focus is 100% on sales and your priority is hiring the right team.
Why sales? Now you have bills and salaries to pay.
It’s both humbling and scary when you first realise that you are not only responsible for serving a community of clients and partners but also that your team and their families depend on the success of your business.
Hiring the right team is important at this stage, as now you’re delegating and no longer have a direct influence on the product you’re selling.
Stage 3: Scale Up: usually 16-250 employees
You are a leader of leaders. Your company has validated its product and you’re aligning and simplifying processes. You’re betting on a select number of products, and trying to 10x, 100x, or 1000x them
– Focus: Defining Your Industry
– Priority: Scaling
– Barrier: Infrastructure
– Ability: Alignment And Simplification
– Decision: You, Your Leadership, Execution
Your focus is defining your place in the industry and your priority is to scale.
Previously, your competition didn’t even know who you were. Now, you have the chance to start challenging their place in the market by inserting yourself.
You will only move to the next stage if you set your company for scale in terms of infrastructure, people, and processes.
Stage 4: Grown Up, Employees: More than 1000
You start fighting a battle to win the market and you control a significant percentage of it.
– Focus: Dominate Your Industry
– Priority: Continuous Reinvention
– Barrier: Comfort Zone
– Ability: Adaptability (Change Catalyst)
– Decision: You, Your Leadership, Team, Strategy, Execution, Cash
Your focus is dominating the industry. Your priority is continually reinventing your business.
Usually, when leaders get to this stage, they develop a sense of accomplishment. Everything seems to indicate that if they keep on doing what they are doing, they’ll maintain their status.
This is how, slowly but surely, companies lose their strength and are eventually put out of business by a newer, smaller, and faster player in the market.
Your Next Leap: Unlocking the Path to $10M
I wrote a short 20-page eBook, “7 Keys to Double the Revenue & 10X Your Business Value in 3 Years or Less,” is your tactical playbook. Loaded with actionable strategies for each growth phase, it’s designed to fast-track your journey.
Want a copy? Reply “EBOOK”.
Step Up to the Challenge
Embark with clarity and tailored strategies by your side. Contact me today for a customised strategy session that can redefine your business’s trajectory. Together, we’ll unlock your business’s full potential, setting you on a direct course to join the elite 0.4%.
