Scaling up Your Tech Company in 2021? Here’s What You Need to Know!

Scaling up is the natural progression for start-ups. To continue projected growth, they must transform and evolve into a new form, one which looks drastically different to the business from which it came. 

One of the most perilous stages in a firm’s lifespan is its scaling stage, grow too quickly and you risk losing what you have fought for. A 2011, a study by The Startup Genome looked at over 3,200 start-ups and found that 74% of them failed because they tried to scale up too quickly. On the other hand, grow too slowly and you risk missing the window of opportunity and getting stuck in the mud, losing capacity and potential business. 

Is Your  Business  Scalable? 

Timing is everything, the right time to scale can make or break a fledgling company. You need to evaluate the situation carefully. This strategic move has to be planned well in advance, taking the current situation to its fullest extent into consideration. 

Scale-Up Checklist

To ease the decision-making process, we have devised a checklist to make sure the required framework for success is in place:

• What processes are in place to cope with the expansion?  
• Do you have the business hierarchy together to help manage the workflow? 
• Have you completed adequate competitor research?  
• Do you have the skills for the task? 
• Do you have the plan? 
• Can you afford to scale right now? 
• Is there a need to scale?
• What new tech needs to be developed in order for you to scale and what are the timelines? Can you realistically build what you need in the time you have your current resources?

Building Your Team 

Your team is your most important asset, without them your firm cannot survive. Building a strong team with a single shared goal is key to success. As many as 97% of employees cite ‘lack of alignment within a team’ as a factor for failure. To find this cohesion, you need to carefully select personnel to match the personality, work ethic, motivation, and ambition of the business.    

While considering this, you should be conscious of bloating your existing numbers. To grow at optimum efficiency, your staff size should be lean.  

The introduction of 15 new hires not only puts a strain on your P&L, it can also lead to the deterioration of your healthy work culture. Lowering employee satisfaction and work output with it. Studies have shown teams with fewer than 10 employees have an engagement level of 42%, this is reduced to 30% in firms with larger set-ups.  

Success Stories

Success stories are all around us, you don’t need to look too far. We have had untold success assisting start-ups transitioning into scale-ups, most notably with Hark. 

Hark provides an enterprise IoT software platform for connectivity, visibility and intelligence in the retail, facilities management and energy markets. Two of the UK’s top four supermarkets currently use Hark’s technology. Hark saved one retailer over £1m in 2019 and in January 2020, have saved enough energy to power 35 homes for a year, or 24 million mobile phones! Hark started out as a fledgling business, through our work with targeted, strategic PR placements and carefully planned campaigns, we were continually evaluating the tone of voice and the content to fit with their new state of scale. In such instances we narrated their content as a larger enterprise with ambition, to allow the audience to see they were no longer a small start-up. 

Whereas Hark were already established, our another growth success story saw us take Panintelligence’s No Code Lab from concept and establishment, to scale up growth. No Code Lab is an initiative founded by Zandra Moore, the CEO of Panintelligence. No Code Lab has created an open-source community of both developers and non-tech natives enthusiastic about the no code movement. The idea was the create a community that can be counted on to develop rapid solutions in times of need. We have been building the platform out for several months and have recently launched a new offering to help new tech start-ups get off the ground. We have seen this initiative go from strength to strength, and we are proud to count it among our successes.  

Are you a leading tech company looking to scale up your business in 2021? Get in touch with our team to find out how we can make your voice heard above the noise.