Scaling – the Bermuda Triangle of growth – is hard, and fraught with failure. Very few of even the top 1% of ventures succeed at scaling, mostly due to poor execution, due to lack of experience scaling businesses.
Launched in 2016, 10X-e is a specialist scale up accelerator and is a collaboration between two of SA’s big brands in entrepreneurship, Vumela and Edge Growth.
The accelerator’s mission is to help entrepreneurial teams scale themselves, scale their teams, and scale their businesses.
According to the organisation, “Our team has helped some of the Continent’s most exciting high growth businesses scale up through the most treacherous parts of the journey. We tailor make multiple workshops to the specific needs of you, your team, and your business. Our workshops serve to address the most pressing challenges that your business faces, helping remove the hurdles towards 10X growth.”
The 10X shares why growth is so difficult for so many businesses and what a business x-ray programme entails.
Why is scaling hard?
Scaling is incredibly hard. For a lot of reasons, but one of the things that happens as you scale is that you build up ‘Organisational debt’, the silent Scale Up killer.
What is Organisational debt?
‘Organisational debt’ is a backlog of ‘Capacity’ (systems, processes, skills, team capacity, and general ‘fixes’) needed for your organisation to work well at your current scale.
The more you scale, the more capacity you need. But you don’t have it, mostly because you’ve been so busy selling and delivering and dealing with people issues that you have not taken the time required to invest in scaling Capacity.
The ‘Capacity’ you need, and don’t have, is your Organisational debt.
It is invisible. And it is deadly.
So if Organisational debt is deadly and invisible, how do you deal with it?
To kill your Organisational debt before it kills you, the first thing you need is to see it. The reason you need to do this Scale Up X-Ray is to have X-Ray vision into your Organisational debt. It will show you the systems and processes that will break when you scale, so you can fix them before they break.
Okay, so what’s this X-Ray going to require from me?
Each of your senior team need to set aside 2 hours to complete the X-Ray online.
You can do it in 3 or 4x 30-minute sessions if you prefer.
But do it separately and individually, and do it in a quiet place where you can reflect deeply, uninterrupted.
We will then compile a super-insightful Scale Up X-Ray report on your business and send it to you. Your Scale Up X-Ray report will include:
- Your company life cycle stage attributes and next milestones to prioritise
- Your business complexity and required level of organisational developmental
- Your level of business development, relative to that required, in each of the core Scale Up functions
- Your Business Maturity Index: your current level of development, on a scale of 1-100
- Your Scale Up weak links –your most urgent business development priorities
- Automated recommendations on how to address your Scale up weak links
