How to develop a business mindset and scale up

If you want to develop a good business mindset and scale-up, then you need to define the difference between growth and scaling-up.

Growth can be understood to be linear and gradual expansion that happens as part of a company’s natural progression. Scaling up in contrast is a much more ambitious sharp revenue increase. To give an example, a growing company is a business that can take 1 customer to 100. A scale-up company is one that can take 100 to 100,000. It’s important to remember that growth is reliant on decision-making, and this is often made in live scenarios. Scaling-up is built on the ability to plan, and to make repeatable decisions again and again. A growing company may have a good leadership team who are able to make quality decisions. It may take them months or even years to be able to make the decisions they do more accurately. A scaling company can onboard new people fast, and they can support them through strong processes that help to simplify decision-making overall. The challenge therefore is to ensure the leaders in a business have a mindset that facilities scaling up.

Do you Have This Mindset?

Amazon began their journey as a start-up. They didn’t grow to become one of the biggest companies in the history of business by duplicating the human effort. They developed an intelligent process, and they had a relentless focus. They then combined this with predictability, repeatability and efficiency. Think about the company you have, was it easy to get your first 10 customers? What about the next 100 customers? If there happened to be a spike in demand and you had to take on 1000 new customers in the next 24 hours, would you be able to meet this demand without a drop in your service quality?

How to Apply the Scale-up Mindset

First, it starts with your people. An African proverb once stated that if you want to go fast, you need to travel alone. If you want to go far, then you need to travel with others. To scale, you need to do both. That’s why intelligent companies can amplify human potential. Unleashing creativity, drive and collaboration can send waves across your organisation.

Hiring new Talent

Scale-ups need to be able to find new people. They also must make sure that they are a good fit for the organisation. Not sure if your process is right? Ask yourself, how successful are you with new hires? You also need to ask yourself; how quickly can new employees add value to your company? This is where executive coaching and leadership development comes in, as your team, and your leaders will grow with your organisation.

Clean Data

How we use AI day to day and in business is set to transform by 2030. Data and intelligence are important, and if you can change your view of how decisions are made, then this will help people to interpret how people act in different situations. You may have hundreds, or thousands of independent decisions made every day, so how you utilise data is important.

Design Things to Grow with You

Don’t focus on where you are today, or tomorrow. Instead, stretch your imagination to the limits and imagine where investing in your people, (your main asset) could take you.

Key Takeaways

So, leadership scaling and growth have some key differences. If you want to scale, you need to:

· Change your view of how decisions are made

· Ensure that your processes are growing with you

· Make sure new talent is immediately contributing to your goals

Want to find out more? Book a virtual leadership course and or Executive Coaching programme with us today, to benefit yourself and your team. You can contact us here.