Innovation: Tips on How to Scale Up Your Technology Start up…

If you are a technology company that has a unique innovative product that you want to get to market at some point in the business cycle your startup in order to scale up will become a company in transition.

A start ups transition is in three areas:

●      Business Strategy - A predominantly services company using custom built technology will need to move to a globally supported enterprise level technology platform company

●      Market Scope - A locally focussed company will need to adapt to a nationally and globally focussed company reaching an audience potentially a thousand to a million times larger

●      Business ownership - A privately held company will need to migrate to a publicly held company and all the reporting and governance issues that go with that

This is a significant amount of transition and undertaking all three elements simultaneously will require a well considered strategy and implementation plan.

The major requirement in this process will be to mitigate the risks and issues you will encounter.

There will be product glitches, there will be mis-hires, there will be unrealistic demands from shareholders and customers. There will be promises made by partners or interested partners in new markets that may not be delivered.

The more you grow the bigger the exposure to these types of risks.

The challenge for you and your team then is to understand where effort, funding and resources are best spent to maximise the outcomes.

An effective transition is multi faceted. This includes:

·   getting the right team and structure, developing a unique positioning for the product;

·   understanding each new market and developing appropriate market entry strategies;

·    optimising cash flow until profitability;

·    focussing on icon reference accounts; and

·    quickly demonstrating scalability to partners and shareholders.

Support That You Will Need

Support uou need to get may include:

●   Understanding how to separate the consultin-technology business from the emerging technology platform business.

●   How to establish a global technology development, sales and support organisation - especially identifying key roles for a technology company.

●   Developing new market entry strategies.

●   Developing distribution and partnering relationships and interactions.

●    Developing product positioning and branding (including versioning and       or variations).

●    Understanding how to scale your business through capability and focus.

●    How to avoid platform superfluous feature creep and platform ‘splitting’.

●    How to develop realistic business models and targets.

●   How to tune the marketing communications, PR , and user base event activity required for a technology company.

●   Providing guidance on platform pricing models and consistent customer proposals.

●   Guiding the time and energy of you and your Co-Founders and key executives to adapt to the needs of an expanding global business.

Conclusions

This is a very exciting period for your comapny.

Sound advice will be required and it will be important to reduce the risk associated with this three pronged transition and your international growth activity.

New shareholders, partners and customers will expect that your strategy and plan for growth is well thought out and capable of being implemented to meet expectations.

So and they say in the Navy “..make it so…’

End