Challenges in growing from small to big

Tips to scale up your business  small to big

Setting up and starting your own business is always exciting. The feeling of owning a business is just fascinating, though one has to go through those initial struggling phases, but once the startup sees the light of the day, it makes you a proud entrepreneur. And the real challenges come when the small setup needs to be scaled up.

Every startup has gone through these challenging phases – some excelled while a few failed. In fact this growth period is a testing time for the entrepreneurs. And we have so many examples such as Flipkart, Zomato, UrbanClap, ShopCues, Housing, Snapdeal, TinyOwl and others.

Let’s now look into some of the challenges faced in growing a business:

Understanding the market

Market and consumers evolve every day. Understanding the pulse of this evolving market is key to survival. Consumer behaviour, purchasing pattern, competition mapping, pricing, packaging etc should be in sync with the market demand, so that your customer gets the best deal.

Managing funds

Business needs money for growing small to big and hence managing funds becomes key to a growing business’ success. For a bootstrapped company, it becomes tough to meet the growing demand of the business in terms of various resources. And for funded companies, raising additional funds from investors with key highlights and forecasted growth becomes an uphill task.

Managing human capital

Biggest challenge for a fast growing small to big company is to get the right talent and retain them. As a startup grows, the owners need to hire the best talent in the industry who could take the company growth to the next level.

Managing risks

Growing business brings in a lot of risks, in terms of instability, financial setback, management issues, aggressive competitors, unfamiliar terrains, new technologies, government policies etc. Business needs to be geared up to face these risks and take some tough calls, for the betterment of the business.

Creating a company culture

Company culture automatically gets built up by the founding members and key people at the very beginning. But as it grows and as people comes on board from various background, age groups and from other companies, it becomes very important to create and maintain a culture that would integrate others and flow across in years to come.

Keeping with the pace of the growth, smaller companies can’t have a set formula to meet the challenges; rather prioritizing might help to meet the increasing demand of the business. Strategies need to be revisited in order to keep the tempo on and meet the key business objectives coupled with some hard decisions. Capacity building is another aspect of the growth story, right from infrastructure to intellectual capacity.

Eventually knowing the future plans and developments of the company enables its stake holders to make more informed choices and make themselves ready for any upcoming challenges. While each and every company are different in their own ways, the challenges faced during this growth stage are almost similar in nature across.

What kind of challenges have you faced while scaling up your business small to big ? Do share your views.

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