It’s not uncommon for businesses to be in a position to grow more quickly than perhaps they first thought. It’s also not uncommon for businesses to encounter difficulties by getting ahead of themselves and running out of cash to support the scaling of essential aspects of the business.

Whether you’re just starting out and giving some thought to these issues, or if you’ve already hit a roadblock and are struggling with scaling your business, the Adjustment Agency can help.

Growing a business has consequences - it also needs to scale

Any business, with aspirations to grow beyond the initial enthusiasm of its startup, will need a plan to scale up. More mature businesses that seek to expand, also need a plan to scale. However, there’s an important distinction to make at this point, one that appears at the heart of many problems associated with business growth and scaling. This is that growing a business and scaling a business are two different concepts, that often get merged, particularly in smaller businesses.

Business growth

While it’s easy to say that business growth is the first priority of any business, circumstances will differ. For instance, a startup maybe some years away from worrying about growth from a revenue perspective, focusing instead on using its funds to bring a product to market. However, at some point for any business, attention will turn to growing the business’s revenue base, through sales and marketing efforts.

Scaling a business

Scaling a business of course implies growth, but more importantly, it concerns how that growth will be supported. Support will be required is a number of areas, for instance, sales and marketing personnel, production capabilities and support infrastructure. There’s no point embarking on a significant sales and marketing campaign if the customers you attract cannot get product, or when they do, can’t get the support they need. Underpinning this is cash. You can’t do any of this without a consistent access to cash. For startups, this may originate from investment funding or other financing arrangements. For fully operational companies, cash may come from operations, or again other financial arrangements.

Just as business growth is different depending on the stage of the business, the same is true for scaling. A startup will still need to scale too, for instance, to bring prototypes to a point where additional second round funding is achieved; from then on, the start up will need to scale to accommodate market trials, for example, and then on to a full scale launch.

How the Adjustment Agency can assist

Given that businesses encounter issues with scaling for very different reasons and that each business is unique from the standpoint of their management and leadership, the Adjustment Agency approaches the issue from two directions; Proactive and reactive.

Proactive assistance

As the name suggests, we will work with your management team, to help avoid any issues when you come to scale up your business.

Our involvement may be from the outset, before your business has taken its first steps. Here, we’ll be involved in helping you put together a business plan. Or, if your business is already underway, we can assist with outlining the practical issues scaling will present as your business grows, and helping you plan for them.

Our experience suggests that businesses often underestimate both the time and cash needed for scaling activities.  This can occur even if the business has good project management skills.  In these situations there is a risk that the business will let down its customers, sometimes in a fundamental way.  We believe that scaling plans should be robustly challenged, and this can come from within the business and/or external business advisers.

We can assist with funding too. If it’s determined that you may need more funds that originally planned for, we can outline the options for you and also may be able to identify potential sources of funding.

Reactive assistance

Not everything does go to plan where business growth is concerned and scaling problems can literally amount to life and death situations for the company.

In a reactive capacity, we can help get the bottom of the issues your business is faced with and put together an action plan to help you recover. This may involve negotiating with your creditors, including HMRC, if you’ve had problems with cash flow, or in restructuring the business to accommodate a revised direction and reduced costs, including seeking renewed or additional funding.