It’s not too hard to understand why scaling up a company is difficult. Imagine a situation where a company with 10 employees grows to 30 employees within a few months. Sounds like a dream to any business owner, but this growth does not come without challenges, such as organizational structures, merging/separating divisions, segmenting business lines, and so on.

In growing from 10 to 100 employees, to 500, 1,000 and so on, companies change beyond all recognition, going through different requirements for capital, management, skills, and organisational structure. The people who work within these scale-up companies can experience ‘growing pains’ due to shifting demands. This can derail companies from their rapid growth trajectories and transform business experience during a period of high growth.

When CSC asked entrepreneurs “what prevents them from growing” the feedback was remarkably consistent, and demonstrates the following challenges:

• A difficulty in develop employees to become generalists
• Introducing new business processes, procedures, and culture
• Introducing new systems and technology platforms
• Developing business leaders with the ability to manage rapid growth
• Attracting appropriate growth capital
• Entering new markets and gaining necessary approvals for new products/services
• Accessing research and development facilities and finding the right premises