You have successfully taken your business from stage zero to the first stage. Now you have a product live in the market, you have some customers, maybe a couple of partners and even a financier. What next? It is now time to move the business to the next stage – thousands of customers, millions of dollars in revenue, a larger team, maybe more financiers, and so on.
Note first that there is no saying how long the startup stage would or should last. It can be a year, two years, five years, or even more. When it is time to move on to the growth stage, it is quite obvious to everyone on the team.
Here are three skills you need when you want to grow your business from the launch stage to become a successful company.
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Sales
Naturally, if you are looking to grow revenue from hundreds of thousands into millions, you need to work on sales. Get more customers on board, increase your market share, expand into new areas perhaps, and generally grow sales. You will need the skills to execute all of these at the growth stage.
Customer service
This is closely linked to the former. As you onboard new customers, you have to develop a customer service culture that will keep your customers glued to you. There will be constant competition with other brands upping their game to give as much or even more than you do. It may require you to upgrade your solution to keep up. If you can keep your customers happy and satisfied, they become your evangelists.
Team building and people management
You are going to be working with a larger team than you did at the beginning. Depending on your model, this may be completely remote, physical, or a hybrid of both. It will take more from you to manage a team of 100 people than it did to manage a team of 10. That is why I mentioned in a previous post that one person may not have all the skills but in some cases they do. You may be good at building and working very well with a team of 10 people, but not a team of 100.
One thing you should keep in mind is creating a sense of mission that brings them together. A lot at this stage will depend on the culture you built with a smaller team. How you develop and treat your team members is very important.
There are other skills you will need as you gradually grow your business from the launch stage to become a successful company. Things like risk management, resource management, and so on. For most of them, you may have team members who have that expertise, but when it comes to sales and people management, you have to be directly involved. You should know what is going on with your sales team at every point because if there are no sales, the business is going nowhere.