Toolkit
Informing decision-making
Applied Analysis
In the scale-up phase, historical financial reporting is never sufficient. When growth is fast, you need to make informed decisions quickly.
Applied analysis on financial and non-financial data creates insights that drive better decisions and increase the probability of achieving desired commercial and purpose-driven outcomes. As your business scales, Finance & Operations must evolve to add value as a centre of business intelligence. World class scale-up CFOs/COOs ensure the business has the capacity across people, systems and processes to deliver consistent, useful and timely information to the whole business.
Key expert
“Generating high quality, relevant and timely information for decision-making is crucial through the Scale-Up phase.”
Steven Dunne, Senior PartnerView Profile
Improving customer experience
Delivery
As demand for your product grows it gets harder to deliver the consistent quality necessary for customers to remain loyal. As your business scales there will be more strain and therefore greater need to proactively improve. This includes customer feedback loops, product development, departmental structures, reporting lines and responsibilities, support functions and both customer and team retention.
Key expert
“Scale-ups need to prioritise the customer experience through product development, operations and service.”
Andrew Betteley, Operating PartnerView Profile
Empowering revenue generation
Customer Acquisition
New business is crucial for all growing companies, whether B2B or B2C, and is a key step to exceeding the Rule of 40 benchmark. The fundamentals are knowing the customer, understanding sales channels and monitoring and responding to influencers and competitor strategies. As you scale, the importance of high-quality recruitment, performance management and team empowerment are core skills to ensure your business still delivers to the same quality. Account management plans, sales management structure, remuneration, incentives and performance management will become increasingly important parts of the process.
Key expert
“Winning new customers and retaining them to forecast is the key to scaling any profitable business.”
James Bagan, Operating PartnerView Profile
Establishing the mission
Strategy
Frogs’ definition of strategy: “A competitive game-plan to achieve an important goal”. Particularly during the scale-up phase, where a degree of product-market fit has already been established, strategy is not about selling a vague market opportunity but rather combining a clear view of addressable market with a robust plan of action as to how this can be exploited. More importantly, recognising the unique resources, attributes and purpose your company has (and will need) to thrive in that environment.
Key expert
“As you scale a business it grows beyond senior management’s line of sight, so purpose and strategy are crucial from a communications perspective.”
David Williams, Operating PartnerView Profile
Building optimal teams
Talent
Hiring senior people smarter than you is uncomfortable, but winning your market requires a major step up in how you see Talent at scale. Investing systematically in culture, organisation and people to nurture and continually assess talent at all levels is essential as your business scales. Purpose-driven businesses have a significant advantage when it comes to attracting and retaining top talent. Seriously excellent people will help you to execute better and will also be involved in shaping strategy through bringing diverse, challenging views. Inevitably your team will evolve along with the challenges you face. An intentional approach to assessing performance, addressing competence gaps and anticipating the need to make a step change and take tough people decisions is necessary. A diverse senior team is essential to share the burden of responsibility for seeing and delivering the vision.
Key expert
“Attracting and integrating seriously excellent talent is one of the biggest challenges for scale-up leaders.”
John Sutherland, Operating PartnerView Profile
Achieving organisational clarity
Organisation
Scaling from around 50 people towards 500 and expanding internationally requires clear organisational ethos and structure at Board level. Setting out how the organisation should work and develop with the right strategic guidance and robust governance will be key to your success. World-class organisational thinking reinforces the company purpose, values and culture. Poor execution creates confusion and politics, and undermines the sense of purpose that you have instilled.
Key expert
“Excellent corporate organisation structure will drive discipline and accountability at all levels in a business.”
John Sutherland, Operating PartnerView Profile
Realising value
Value
Building significant value through the scale-up phase is one important measure of your team and investors’ success in executing your purpose and vision. Understanding how and why different prospective stakeholders value companies like yours is critical to ensure you are focusing on the right strategic goals well ahead of time. Keeping your exit options broad de-risks your future. Careful and consistent management of your brand and reputation amongst this audience is time consuming but vital. Having an excellent Board and shareholder group will provide constructive support and alignment.
Key expert
“Value creation is an outcome of building a successful business, not an objective to be set in its own right.”
David Williams, Operating PartnerView Profile
