From start-up to scale-up: how to accompany growth with innovation

You can’t be a start-up forever: at a certain point, when growth is continuous and products or services are becoming established in the market, it’s time to move up the ladder and become a scale-up. This is a turning point where it will be necessary to expand, capture new markets, reach different customers and launch products that are even more innovative than their predecessors.

The good news: by the very essence of evolution, these organizations have the necessary growth momentum to make the overall outlook quite optimistic. However, there is one detail they cannot neglect: how to continue to scale in terms of digitization to ensure that new technologies support the business and enable future growth.

Here, scale-ups have a huge advantage over long-established companies in the market: the absence of legacy. Not only is there no huge investment in infrastructure that tends to be obsolete and almost forces applications to be migrated to the cloud: there is also no deep-rooted culture that prevents the adoption of new business models or the incorporation of new processes.

Evaluating maturity

Still, there are multiple challenges, and taking the right steps in the right direction is critical to underpin growth rather than hinder it. The first step is to analyze the state of maturity in terms of digital transformation and to what extent the existing overview is enough to support the new scale.

Are processes properly optimized and automated? Are there opportunities for optimization? Are digital resources used to support an exponential growth of operations? Is the customer experience deliverable and can it be improved? These are just some of the possible questions but the list will vary according to the needs, orientation and experience of each company.

Here is another plus, the key technology in all this journey known by all startups: the cloud. It allows rapid deployment of digital channels, provides the scalability to support demand peaks and reduces investment if results are not as expected.

Exploiting data

Data analysis also deserves analysis: the leap in scale will be accompanied by an increase in the volume of data, so it will be necessary to have capture, storage and recovery models ready. In this sense, data lake is consolidating as a simple, economical and efficient option to extract the maximum value from data, both structured and unstructured.

Likewise, the continuous exploration of new technologies that could bring value to the business in this new position. For example, artificial intelligence, big data and analytical tools as allies to evaluate scenarios and predict behavior, which is essential considering that scale-up will be taking its first steps.

Automation plays a key role: the level of activity will suddenly grow a lot. That is why keeping tedious, repetitive and time-consuming tasks under control can be the difference between success and failure.

Between talent and metrics

Another major challenge that scale-ups may face is the shortage of new technology talent in the market. Companies are neither big enough to attract nor small enough not to need them. An efficient way to overcome this pitfall is through a technology partner that provides the digital skills needed to develop and deploy ongoing projects.

While this part of the process is often underestimated, it is critical to monitor and measure the results of digital transformation initiatives that are already underway. It is well known that what cannot be measured cannot be improved and the only way to retrace this innovation journey is to know if the investment has paid off in order to plan future investments.

A proper digital transformation process is the key for a start-up to grow strong and healthy as it matures and becomes a scale-up.