Growth is another big milestone which teaches many lessons to entrepreneurs. Apparently, very few people see this stage, Entrepreneurs have to be very careful in this phase and focus on stabilizing the system. The real entrepreneur skills would come out in this period.

Retaining the Core Team:

Yes, it’s time to take enough care of the core team. Once revenue starts getting generated there could be disputes and misunderstanding, the leader should be matured enough to mitigate critical situations. Retain every genuine core member admire, assign them into bigger roles, provide good financial benefit and if he/she deserved, offer some shares. Please don’t ignore every genuine member who helped to reach the stage of growth. Why? Losing each member will have a great impact on the business as there might be having a lot of dependencies. Apparently, it is ethical to make them happy. I would like to suggest one more important thing here, kick a team member off if he is not fair and honest enough at the time of seed stage don’t wait until growth stage.

Raising Funds:

Eventually, every stage funds required to manage the show. As bootstrapping has its limitation, you will be forced to choose an investor. However, invest a good amount of time for the evaluation before raise funds. I would suggest, don’t excite the valuation and raise big money as that put you under unnecessary pressure.

Customer care:

At any point of time customer relationship is critical. You may have big customer wave in the growth stage, making every customer happy is a nightmare as the size of the team, infrastructure, capability tools, experience may not be adequate to support the wave. I would suggest, prioritize this activity as top one and get ready to face it otherwise; it will have a great bad impact to get the repetitive customers. Every day you may have to search for new clients who are tough.

Where to spend bandwidth:

Your valuable time should be consumed at the right place as you could have managed the show with a small team so far. Eventually, as you are growing the challenges and problems also grow in parallel. Build next layer to make decisions and be in the high-level monitoring and execution as you could have already seen the ground level so utilize your bandwidth to stabilize every department. Enjoy this stage every day is a new learning and every day will be memorable.

Sales & Promotions:

Never stop the promotions, accelerate even more to grab the market share. Once you gain the customer confidence never hesitate to pour more money into sales and promotions. If you could be able to reach 1000 people there is a chance of 10 people stick with you.

All the best 🙂

Also Read: How to build good culture in your startup

Narasimha Mohan

He is the Author, Product Specialist, Business Consultant, Entrepreneur, Public Speaker, Thought provoking writer, and Joke writer. Follow him on Twitter