Stages

1

New Venture
2

Early Growth
3

Rapid Growth
4

Continuous Growth

Find a Viable Business Model

  • The company never determines who their customers are and what those customers really want.
  • A revolutionary product may be developed, but there’s no market for it.
  • A small business is created that can’t scale into a large company because the market is too small.
  • The company will hemorrhage cash if sales and marketing are scaled prematurely.
  • There will be a lack of customers because no one is willing to pay for the product.
  • The business will not be able to find a viable business model before it runs out of cash and fails.

Create Customers & Drive Sales

  • The leader will be a bottleneck because there is only one decision maker.
  • The company will lack direction as priorities constantly shift as an “idea-of-the-day” management style dominates.
  • Efforts will be scattered, time and money will be wasted, and growth will be slowed.
  • The company will not be able to grow beyond the individual capacity of its leader.
  • The increasing workload will become unmanageable.
  • Delays will be routine, critical milestones will be missed, and goals will have to be constantly revised because the company can’t execute.
  • There will be too many priorities and too much time will be spent fighting fires.
  • The business will be unable to gain broader market acceptance and fail.

Scale the Company

  • Functional departments will move in separate directions; silos, politics, and even infighting will develop.
  • It will become almost impossible to get things done because the company lacks structure and process.
  • Products will become obsolete, new products will not meet customer needs, and competition will intensify.
  • The organization will not have the right people in the right positions. The senior management team will be weak and ineffective.
  • Chaos will grow: communication will breakdown, it will take more effort to get things done, and bottlenecks will develop.
  • With every new sale, problems will increase and the company will be unable to consistently deliver high quality.
  • The business will be unable to scale, sales will slow or decline, and the business will remain a small company or even fail.
  • Investors or board will replace an ineffective leader who can’t make the changes necessary to get the company to the next level of growth.

Become a Market Leader

  • The organization’s earlier success cannot be sustained and the company will begin to stagnate and lose focus.
  • New competition will erode market share; revenue and profits will fall. The company will be in a weakened state and much more vulnerable to harmful market forces.
  • The CEO will not be able to address strategic issues because internal matters are taking up too much time.
  • Industry, market, and technological changes will happen faster than the company can keep up with them.
  • There won’t be any new products available when existing products no longer produce the growth rates desired.
  • The management team will be underdeveloped, creating bottlenecks throughout the organization.
  • The company will become bureaucratic and lose the entrepreneurship necessary to drive further growth.
  • The company will stagnate, decline, or fail.