Your start up business may have very modest growth plans, or it may have very ambitious ones. Either way, there are some important elements you will need in order to make sure that your growth can happen in the first place and how you sustain that growth.
We will assume, for the purposes of this article, that you have a product or service to sell already and that you have done enough due diligence and research to be sure that you can indeed sell it to your target marketplace.
With all that in place, what else will you need to make sure you can scale and succeed in your start-up venture?
Start-Ups Need – Human Capital
A business is only ever as good as the people who run it and deliver its goods and/or services. Investing in your human capital is therefore vital. You need to make sure that you recruit people with the right skillset and the right psychological fit for your team. This is especially true in a small team. If you have only got four people working for you and you bring in a fifth who turns out to be a bad fit this means that 20% of your workforce are effectively operating sub-par and are very likely to be affecting the performance of the other 80%. Morale and productivity go hand in hand and would be directly affected by bad recruitment. Even in larger corporations it has been shown that a few bad apples really can spoil the entire cart.
Your human capital is also yourself. As a business owner you should never stop learning, growing and looking to improve. The better you are, the better job you can do of running your business.
Start-Ups Need – Funding
It goes without saying, but every business needs money to operate and continue to operate. In a start-up it can of course be the case that you will not make much (if any) money from sales in the early days and months, and possibly longer than that.
In such cases you need funds in place to carry you through that period of zero income. If you’re lucky enough to already have the personal wealth to carry you through this period, you can sometimes afford to take that risk. However, if you are in the more common position of needing to raise funds to help you cover this gearing-up period then there are grants, innovation schemes and private equity investors available to help.
Start-Ups Need – A Scalable Model
The most important thing of all is of course ensuring that you have planned or considered the scalability of your business model. If it is very personnel-heavy and requires lots of time from individual people to deliver to your clients then it will be very difficult to scale without having to increase your costs to very high, if not unsustainable levels.
If however, you can develop it in such a way that it can continue to deliver to an exponentially growing number of clients without the need for you hire new people, rent new premises, buy more machinery or otherwise increase your running costs in a like-for-like ratio, then you can start to take advantage of economies of scale. This will mean you have what is a more scalable model.
There are so many factors that will directly affect the success of a start-up and its scalability, the above are simply the main three that need to be in place to have a chance of succeeding.
For more information, or to organise a free consultation with us, please get in touch today.
Email us info@thealtitudeagency.com or call 0203 150 0565.
