What is the Stage of Development to Make a Business Bigger?
The stage of development to make a business bigger primarily hinges on where a company is in its growth. Determining this requires a solid understanding of the stages of small business growth, which serves as a roadmap to guide your company’s progression and manage its resources accordingly at any given moment.
The Stages of Small Business Growth
To guide business growth, SMB owners require a firm sense of where they are in their growth cycles. One of the most thorough analyses of small business growth, conducted in the 1980s, delineates five specific growth stages:
- Existence: this depends on gaining customers and delivering quality products or services.
- Survival: where immediate needs, such as customer retention and offsetting expenses, are satisfied, and the new focal point is on maximizing revenue.
- Success: a crossroads where the company must choose between maintaining operations and protecting profits or investing revenue in expansion.
- Take-off: as the company takes the big-picture view: how to achieve rapid growth, along with the means of financing it?
- Resource maturity: requiring consolidation and tighter controls of the factors that fueled success and expansion.
Which Stage Is Your Company In?
Over the course of our business coaching program, we work with companies and lone entrepreneurs experiencing any of these given stages. Most often, though, our long-term clients are those who wind up breaking the boundaries between stages three and four, and four and five.
Many clients, for example, sense a gravity underlining their success, which is their budding awareness of the need to choose between deepening their stability or taking some risks toward new growth. This is when some feel like they’re at a stage of development to make a business bigger.
Others are experiencing the thrill of seeing revenues take off, then wisely seeking counsel in order to harness their windfalls for the greatest long-term maturation. Companies that don’t risk spreading resources thin, unrealistically expecting to remain in the take-off phase forever (and in doing so, risk it all).
Even after maturity is firmly established, a company must accept the existence stage once more, if they decide to stake new claims in unknown markets, where success (or even survival) is once again on the line.
Focusing on One Stage of Development To Make a Business Bigger
Wherever your company is in its growth cycle, you’ll achieve much greater direction with a firm knowledge of where in the stages of small business growth you are at any given moment.
So which stage of development will make your business bigger right now? To find out, contact us, and schedule a highly informative initial consult at absolutely no obligation.
