The Scale-Up Challenge

June 2025

The challenge of moving from start-up to scale-up strategy, and to exit readiness, is a journey every entrepreneur and founder needs to consider.

I’ve been fortunate in the past few weeks to be judging some of the entries into this year’s APSCo awards for excellence. To see - and relive - some of these challenges again and how people approach them has brought back many memories.

In my experience, here’s four fundamentals or principles which I’ve learned and apply now when mentoring or advising agency founders and leaders.

1. Immerse yourself in your business. Don’t play with it. Work hard and focus on operational excellence. Don’t be busy fools - do the activity, avoid the ivory tower and understand what's going on day-to-day as well as big picture.

2. Be strategic with your stakeholder relations. Nurture them. Look after them. Build relationship capital. With clients, candidates, colleagues. As per my post the other day, you need to build trust. It’s tough to gain, and easily lost.

This applies to trade bodies, industry commentators and influencers too. All provide vital intelligence, connections, and can have an impact on your corporate and personal professional brand and reputation.

3. Don’t ignore the numbers. Track performance metrics. However you are managing your business, review and review again - it allows you to make wise and informed data-driven decisions.

Build cycles to review things - monthly, quarterly, yearly for example. Look at your ratios and KPI cycles; understand how people are spending time; review the overall business strategy.

Information equals understanding (or leads to questions in search of answers) so you can stay agile and adapt to opportunities and threats.

4. Lastly celebrate wins, however small - it builds confidence and will lead to more success. It’s about creating a growth mindset.