Business Growth

Growth is a natural and desirable outcome for entrepreneurial ventures. In fact, it is part of definition of entrepreneurship. As one can define entrepreneurship as the process whereby an individual or group of individuals uses organized efforts and means to pursue opportunities to create value and growth by fulfilling wants and needs through innovation and uniqueness, no matter what resources are currently held.

Entrepreneurship ventures pursue growth. An organization that is not growing but instead is staying the same isn’t entrepreneurial.

Nevertheless growing successfully doesn’t necessary occur randomly or by luck. Successfully pursuing growth typically requires an entrepreneur to manage all the challenges associated with growing.

Most small firms don’t grow to any size. They are life style that provide owner manager with an acceptable income but more important a comfortable life style. However even these often grow to a certain size and then fatter or stagnate. Breakpoints frequently occur at around five employees. Going beyond 20 employees often means the way business is organized has to change.

The problem starts when the business threatens to become a separate entity in its own right.

At this point the owners start to feel that the business is out of their control.

Typically they can no longer do everything with one or two key support staff, communication is failing and mistakes are happening too frequently for comfort. The demands on the owner’s time are unbearable and so the next stage is to formalize a management team and delegate responsibility and authority.

The owner is the only person who can decide whether to go for growth and all that it entails or to establish comfortable limits. For the majority of the business owners decision is about how to keep success at maximum while maintaining the size of the company for their own comfort.

The entrepreneurial owner will need a plan for dealing with situation and growth to be rapid. If the owner did not go into business with the express purpose of growing a successful company, but the success of business is encouraging he may also be considering growth as an inevitable part of success.

The growing of a business requires the efforts and desire of individual entrepreneur.