Scaling for Success

Canadians are running one of the world's most ambitious experiments in learning how to help promising growth companies learn how to scale.

"Scaling" is a fun term. Look it up in Google Image Search and you find picture after picture of dental hygienists poking at your teeth with sharp metal instruments. 

But in business, scaling is the new term for "managing growth." Scaling is about scraping away your bad habits to expose the shiny value proposition beneath - and then developing a dozen new organizational capabilities (strategic communications, delegation, culture development, recruitment, finance, sales management, etc.) to ensure that you know how to compete on a global scale.

Essentially, scaling is the discipline all businesses must master if they hope to survive and grow. That's why I'm so interested in the Lazaridis Scale-Up Program now being workshopped by Wilfrid Laurier University’s Lazaridis Institute for the Management of Technology Enterprise. For the second year, they've selected 10 companies from across Canada to participate in a six-month crash course in scaling - as a way of learning how to teach scaling, and then how to scale it so more Canadian entrepreneurs can benefit from that education.

Imagine the competitive advantage Canada could enjoy if its best and brightest companies understood the challenges and logistics of scaling. We could create all the "unicorns" we want, and finally build the 21st-century economy we've dreamed of.

So here's the link to my first article about Cohort II of the Lazaridis Scale-Up Program.

As you'll see, it all starts with better communication. 

Specifically, how can you engage stakeholders' heart, mind and gut - in 20 seconds?

Excerpt:

Be clear (What do you do?).

Be compelling (How much better are you? How are you different?).

Be credible (Can we believe you?).

Those messages go straight to the head, the heart and the gut, in that order.

Click here for more.