“All businesses start
as an idea, an opportunity, or a hunch.”
“But as a business
grows, it has to shed the startup phase of gut instinct and guesswork. Founders
need to embrace an ever-evolving framework of processes and systems – such as
accounting, human resources and even internal communications – to ensure that work
started by just one or two people can be understood and consistently supported
by employees and associates of all different levels and backgrounds.”
This was the opening of my four-part Financial Post series last
month on “scaling”. That’s the process we used to call “managing growth,”
before Silicon Valley found a cooler buzzword.
I wrote four stories for the National Post on different
aspects of managing your company’s growth, oops, I mean scaling. VCs use this
term to describe how tech startups can master the path to global success, but these
stories are meant for any business leader trying to get ahead of the competition.
Hopefully that includes just about everybody.
Here are the yarns you should check out:
Scaling your family business
Scaling fast and slow
Managing the baffling logistics of scaling
The secret of
scaling: managing three businesses at the same time.
-
the
business as it is (current state);
-
the
business it will become over the next year (next-state);
-
and the
business you think it could become in five years (long-term).
Plus: The LazaridisInstitute’s Scale-Up Program is exploring the right way to help promising companies
learn to scale. Here’s what their test entrepreneurs learned in Year One.
