According to the OECD definition a scaleup company is a company who has an average annualized return of at least 20% in the past 3 years with at least 10 employees in the beginning of the period. If we look at it from the aspect of life cycle of company – scale -ups are companies that are in growth phase.
Research shows that not all start-up companies make it big, some just stay small and don’t make the large contribution to the society. This is the reason why term scale-ups came to existence to identify companies that add value to the society by the means of new technology, services and increase of employment. Focus of policy makers and researchers shifted toward scale-ups and to investigating their needs and making market more responsive to the needs of scale up companies.
So what are the challenges that scale-ups are facing?
While a startup's main challenge is to find a repeatable scalable business model, a scaleup's main challenge is growth of the already identified business model while maintaining operational controls.
In general scale-up need to worry about:
- revenue stream,
- number and qualification of employees,
- number of active users, customers, or effective reach,
- organization structure and culture
- monitoring and reporting results
- networks
Real business skills like: accounting, management, marketing and other are what entrepreneur need to know in order to be able to grow – to scale up!
SMART incubator services for scale up
SMART incubator platform offers:
- Trainings for increasing business skills of owners and managers of scale up business
- Knowledge sharing from companies that made it through this phase and now they are sustainable companies.
- Mentoring services for scale up companies
- Access to funding to grow.