How to Help Your Company along the 5 Stages of Business Growth
All companies must go through a growth cycle. Once you launch a new business, your startup will enter in the first stage of the economic lifecycle. With a lot of work and dedication and a bit of luck, your startup will become successful, entering the growth and maturity phases. At every step of the way, you will have to take the proper decisions in order to ensure your company’s success. Let’s see which are the stages of business growth.
The Stages of Business Growth
1. Existence Stage
This is the first stage of business, in which the owner must attract clients and deliver the product as expected. You must meet or even exceed customers’ expectations. Think about certain issues such as getting enough clients and creating a database, developing a well-functioning production process, and more. At this stage, the owner does almost everything on his/her own. You need to aim for stabilization.
2. Survival Stage
When you arrive at this phase, your business has already proven it is solid enough to exist and attract clients. To survive, a company must adjust to the economic factors. Adaptability is a major element. Survival is one of the stages of business growth in which you need to gather as much feedback as possible from collaborators and clients. Then, transform these insights into better products and services.
3. Success Phase
During this stage, owners must take a hard decision. They can either choose to expand their business due to its accomplishment or keep it as it is, stable and profitable, without taking additional risks. If your firm has arrived in this step of its growing process, it means you have enough financial resources to maintain an ascendant trend. As I previously mentioned, you can either continue your growth or disengage. This choice depends on a lot of many factors such as your business’ activity, resources, and more.
4. Growth or Take-Off
This stage is the one that follows in the case in which you have chosen to expand your business in the previous phase. Now is the time to hire competent managers, and to develop a more complex business activity. Pay attention to the environment changes because they might mess with your plans. The takeoff stage might not have your desired outcomes. Instead of growing, you might fall back in the success phase.
5. Resource Maturity
The biggest challenge in this phase is controlling your financial resources. Maturity is one of the hardest stages of business growth. On the one hand, you will have an entire team by now that can manage all the company’s departments. On the other hand, the world is changing quickly. Therefore, you need to train your staff to have a flexible and agile mentality. Avoid improvisation and bet on planning and optimization.
Final Thoughts
Knowing all the stages of business growth will help you overcome challenges easier. A business owner faces a lot of obstacles, and he/she has to be agile enough to face them in a proper way. Planning is key, but being open-minded and adaptable is even more important. Follow our guidelines to create a successful company.
