For Great Ventures™: Stress Testing Growth and Scaling Your Early Success

Envisioning the step of stress testing growth when you are at the very beginning of your journey can seem like a huge and immensely challenging step outside your comfort zone.  However, by the time you arrive at this step, you should have mastered the habit of stepping outside your comfort zone.  And, if you have embraced the other keys for great ventures up to this point, this step will seem no more scary or challenging than any other step outside your comfort zone.

That’s not to say there are not real challenges to stress testing growth.  However, what you have become and what you have created so far on this journey gives you the best chance of meeting the challenges of stress testing your growth.

Let’s look at some of what you have become and created by mastering the other keys to a great venture:

- You started where passion, vision, and opportunity intersected to deliver an uncommon offering.  You adapted and adjusted like other great ventures along the way (60 percent of the great ventures in one study made it on products and services that were not a part of their original plans).  You resisted the temptation to pursue opportunity for opportunity’s sake – you made sure that passion was a big part of the equation!

- You checked and verified viability along the way.  You made sure:

• it serves a customer’s important needs enough to get them to exchange currency for it
• it delights customers and other shareholders so much that resources become more readily available
• it attracts talented and passionate people to the cause
• it changes the risk equation in your favor (the opportunities, rewards, possibilities far outweigh the contained risk)

- You developed solid plans (business plan, financial plan, and strategic meeting rhythm plan) to start and you regularly updated and modified them to support your evolving path.

- You built master plans (Best of Breed Analysis, Scalability Model, Business Development Model, and Dashboards) for ultimate success while serving your earliest customers.

- You made the different and better choice to identify and fervently pursue “The Right Chunk of Scalable Business.”

- You cemented your foundation in the right way through facilitative leadership, true empowerment, a winning culture, and an employee ownership mentality.  Your foundation is strong and able to support the test ahead.

In all that you have become and created during the earlier stages of your great ventures are the seeds to stress test growth.  You may have the choice at this stage to just continue your current business model and current level of success.  Or, you may not have that option because you can not deliver the appropriate return on the investment to those who supported your early efforts.  Either way, you could not be any better prepared to stress test the growth of your venture right now.

It is time to focus on adding another 3 to 5 chunks of business and assess the minimum operational efficiency of your business.  You have all the tools necessary at this stage, you just need to set a new focus and test your business model.  You will put similar skills to test during this phase but you will have to face those tests while you ramp up your systems and add more people to support several orders of magnitude increases in output during a 12 to 18-month window. 

You will now put professional management systems and structures in place to manage the chaos associated with scalable growth.  However, these systems and structures must direct the flow of chaos, and not choke it.  Now is NOT the time to suffocate all the success and energy for your early efforts!

© Copyright 2010 Jon L. Iveson, Ph.D.