1
New Venture
2
Early Growth
3
Rapid Growth
4
Continuous Growth
Find a Viable Business Model
- Identify and understand customers’ most important problem or need.
- Define and develop a product or service that solves the problem or fulfills the need.
- Verify that customers will pay for your product and that the revenue generated will result in a profitable business model.
- Determine that the market has a high enough growth potential to support the business over time.
- Develop a repeatable and scalable sales process by learning how to sell to a small set of early customers.
Create Customers & Drive Sales
- Now that the market has been found, it’s time to mine it.
- Begin to ramp-up sales and marketing efforts.
- Prove broader market acceptance of your product or service by attracting and selling to a larger base of customers.
- Develop basic operations and initial infrastructure, add key resources, and hire enough people to support a growing customer base.
- Gain visibility and credibility by winning a set of satisfied early “reference” customers to help attract additional customers.
Scale the Company
- Achieve widespread use of the company’s products or services and create a solid market position.
- Scale up operations and build the organizational infrastructure necessary to support increasing growth and complexity.
- Build a strong management team, one that can scale and grow the company.
- Develop a full-scale sales and marketing effort.
- Fill the gaps in the company’s functional expertise and experience.
- Recruit, hire, train, and manage many new people.
- Acquire and manage the financial, human, technical, physical, and other resources needed to grow.
- Scale without losing the very qualities that made the business successful in the first place.
Become a Market Leader
- Develop a strategic plan for locating new growth opportunities while the existing business is still growing.
- Transform exiting markets, expand to new markets, develop new products, and create new businesses.
- Stimulate and support entrepreneurship as a mindset and cultural component throughout the organization.
- Make the operational and organizational changes necessary to meet the requirements of ever-higher levels of growth and success.
- Continuously look for signs the business model needs changing, such as competitive threats, new technologies, and changing customer needs.
- Develop the senior management team as both operational leaders of their functional areas and strategic leaders of the company.
- Attract, hire, and develop the talent required to run and grow the business.
- Maintain the right balance between the systems and controls needed to effectively manage the business and the flexibility necessary for entrepreneurial activity and growth.
