‘ SCALE ‘ ……What’s in your way?
Nearly every client and business owner I have worked with or spoken to starts out with a vision of growing their businesses to enormous scales. Of course, the reality is often different and quite difficult to accept. Not all businesses will achieve global domination such as the likes of Coca Cola , Facebook and Ebay. Most businesses have a mammoth task in growing to a sustainable level and face even greater challenges to scale.
From the off set, when I help clients to reach their goals and ambitions, I make it clear to them that there are limiting factors along the way and the challenges which address those limiting factors must be overcome.
If your business looking to scale up, over the period of the next few weeks I will present a series of articles examining the limiting factors of SCALE.
In the modern, dynamic and digital economy small to medium businesses can do very well as long as they respond to the climate around them. The following points may help better understand the factors involved in growth and scaling.
1. Brand recognition-
Brand influence is a numbers game. A small to medium sized business doesn’t have the same brand influence as the global giants do, I find creating a business around a specific community and specialist product or service is more likely to gain traction. A successful example of this is Yonex, the company has been around for decades and specialises in badminton sports equipment. The company very early on settled to be the expert in that sport and more or less dominates the supply chain. The Yonex brand is synonymous with badminton as Holland and Barrett is with health and well-being. Fortunately for Yonex, it now has a business that is able to use its brand to penetrate other sports such as golf and tennis. Whether it successfully competes with other brands will depend on other limiting factors which you can read about in the article which follows on next time.
My conversation around Brand with my clients is always firmly anchored with the long-term future of the business and the focus needs to be on other contributing factors of growing the businesses.
