What’s a scaleup? You might be wondering whether this is a concept. You could be wondering whether we meant to say startup and we’ve just said it wrong twice at the beginning of this post, first in the title, and then as the third word in this post. To get you acquainted with what you’ll be working on with your business during the Scaleup: How to successfully manage growth HiOP that’s part of IEXL, we’re going to go over you a brief definition of the term scaleup.

This is the first learning objective we have in Scaleup: How to successfully manage growth, which is all about identifying your situation in the scaleup stage, and then from there, you will adapt your enterprise accordingly.

If you can’t see the translated English in orange at the bottom of this image, don’t fret, we’ve got you covered.

A ‘scale-up’ is an enterprise with average annual growth in employees or turnover greater than 20 per cent per annum over a three year period, and with more than 10 employees at the beginning of the period.

Now that you have the definition, you could be thinking: this text you just gave me to explain it all makes sense but what other clues could you give me?

Yes, what we’ve just given you is a technical explanation. But, curious about what it looks like in the business lifecycle?

Joe Haslam recently presented a study he conducted at IE related to the scaleup theme, and he included this picture as part of his explanation.

If you take a closer look at the graphic, what we find the most important is the gap between the one you get over the new barriers in the start-up stage and where you locate the figure trying to climb up afterward. Then, once you do that, you’ll get to the scaleup stage before you can keep going onto the greener pastures of being a scaler and, hopefully, a sustainable corporation. The process of scaling up is all about, as you see in red letters all in caps, CROSSING THE CHASM.

Why do we need to treat the scaleup as something different?

In another one of the graphics that Haslam included in the presentation of the same study we mentioned before, the scaleup stage has a unique set of features. Instead of just being a transitional period from a small-fry startup to a larger corporate giant that now takes a seat at the table with the large corporations of yore.

As your business matures, in the scaleup stage, you have identified your product-market fit but, as the tree in the graphic he used to describe this point, scaling up is about doubling down. Only when you’ve done that can you move towards product-market dominance.

Worried about doing all this? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.

How, you may ask?

We’ll cover this in the Scaleup: How to successfully manage growth HiOP. If you’re dying to know more about the program, check out our homepage and click here to download your copy of our prospectus. And if you’re ready to scale up, get started on your application.