Every business has some specific path and life-cycle. This helps in keeping a balance between the market and your idea. In this chapter, you will learn about the primary life-cycle of a business, which is essential for entrepreneurs to sustain in the long run. Many entrepreneurs spent way too much time thinking about scaling. As an entrepreneur, if you focus on quality and adoption with your market needs, scalability will take place as per your requirement. Let's first see the life-cycle.
The Enterprise Life-cycle
Every entrepreneur has to pass through these different phases of the enterprise life-cycle. The decision-making skills of employees take part as an essential role in his/her organization.
- Modest early-stage survival: This is the beginning era where the conceptualization of your company takes place. Here you focus on spreading your idea as a product to your target market. Then wait for the revenue to come in, and this does a sustainable business.
- Endurance to equipped maturity: It is called the "post-startup" stage where your company is experiencing growth. Here you have to adapt to the small changes and updating. Operations are effectively as well as efficiently managed for serving your customers.
- Operational maturity to the scalable enterprise: In this stage, the founding team plans to bring new innovative ideas or domains to objective or take an exit — i.e., sell the business at a profit.
What are adoption and scaling?
Business success requires steady adoption for efficiently surviving in the competitive market. Adoption is choosing to take up something or opting as well as including new, trending, and innovative things to your ideas and product. Let us take an example of Google, which started as a search engine; then, it brings efficient algorithms to actions. It gradually began acquiring other companies with different domains like bio-medical, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Machine Learning (ML). Creating autonomous vehicles and implementing drone technologies are some of the new niche achieved by Google Inc. Become accustomed to new technologies and efficiently use them in the new domain.
Scaling, on the other hand, delineates to get the huge funds when you have a grip (establish that your idea works and brings revenue, and the market accepts it), that time you can scale & grow proportionately based on the investments to sustain the business model. Scaling is concerning an increasing impact while growing as organizational size and take in more resources. Based on the profit and the flow of work and pressure, enterprises can often grow.
What needs to be done?
Rather than scaling your business illogically with programmers, hiring associates, serves and infrastructures, etc., take the minimum and start building the prototype first. Because the beta version of your product - prototype, is the thing that will guide you to mold it according to its users and consumers. It will help shape your idea and fix the issues and add requirements to it. In the wolf of startups, there is a say, "Focus on quality, and you will achieve scale". This should have to be the mindset of every entrepreneur. So, focus on scaling when it's a problem. When you as an entrepreneur feel like you need to grow your stuff because the number of customers or target consumers or quantity of projects has increased and you need to deliver them on time, you can plan to scale. It was never as such that the biggest problem of a company is scaling.
The biggest problem usually for most companies is achieving critical mass, meeting consumer needs, supporting them, and adapting to their change in requirements. This is the opposite of scaling. There is a proverb, "Practice eating what you can kill". This means you need to know your limits and act according to the need and requirements. These are some key points an entrepreneur should know and make decisions accordingly.