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Brain Circuits
Meet the Magnificent 7 of scaling
Business leaders who successfully scale demonstrate seven key strategic, organizational, and leadership disciplines.
Strategy discipline
1. Find product-market fit before you scale
The first quality of a successful scaler demands patience and discipline: prototype, experiment, measure, learn, and repeat until you have product–market fit and ensure that the market is there. Only then should you begin to design for scaling.
2. Pick the numbers that matter
Identify the North Star metrics that guide growth: two or three actions that will move the company forward and the numbers or ratios that indicate good decisions. Focus on leading indicators – what you expect to see in the future rather than past sales figures.
3. Avoid opportunity overload
If your product or service generates great feedback and sales, you will be faced with a multitude of opportunities. Your bandwidth is limited. Align opportunities with your North Star metrics and say no to everything else.
Organization design
4. Build systems, not dependence
The structure, processes, incentives, and people profiles you had at founding likely need to evolve (or even change drastically) as you scale. As CEO and founder, you need to identify which decisions you must keep for yourself, then delegate effectively.
5. Leverage customers as partners and platforms
As you scale, the quality of a client should not be judged solely by their immediate financial value. They should also bring you new clients and challenge the organization and mature it. And think about which customers make good partners for experimentation – ideally, a forgiving customer who will work with you through failures, but small enough that a failed experiment will not damage your business.
Leadership mindset
6. Stay humble, experiment, and learn
As many aspects of a startup or scale-up are in the realm of the unknown, the appropriate approach requires humility combined with a commitment to experimentation and learning.
7. Commit unequivocally to fast growth
A commitment to growth is not decided in a vacuum. Decide this goal with your board and your team, then announce your decision clearly. Team culture will probably have to change as you move from growth to scale-up, so make sure everyone is aligned.
Checklist
Go through these questions to make sure you are not skipping any key stages:
- Is the market large, growing, and willing to pay?
- Are our North Star metrics based on growth?
- Are our opportunities aligned with our metrics?
- Are you a catalyst or a bottleneck as CEO?
- Will our clients bring us new ones?
- Are we learning through experimentation?
- Is everyone on board with our plans for growth?
Key takeaway
Successful scaling is less about strategy than about the evolution of the founder and their successors through the repeated application of seven strategic, organizational, and leadership disciplines.
Authors
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