From Startup to Scale-up: Reinventing Growth

Key Takeaways

• At around US$20m ARR, a business needs to stop thinking like a startup and start operating as a scale-up.
• CEOs must evolve with the organisation by adding structure, process and data-driven decision-making without losing momentum.
• Growing towards US$50m ARR requires new routes to market, strategic partnerships and readiness for larger enterprise sales cycles.

Topics

• SaaS
• Startup Growth
• Leadership
• Business Strategy

Transcript

You're in your eighth year of building ScreenCloud now. You're doing 21 million pounds—21 million U.S. dollars ARR, because we're mostly focused on America, so we do everything in dollars. Got you. Very impressive. Thank you. What's next? More growth. Unrelenting growth. Actually, no. So it's interesting. So I think around the 20 million mark, I mean maybe a bit earlier, depends on what's going on, right? Because a lot of our, you know, we were affected by COVID, so I'd say we probably were a little bit later coming to this scale-up stage because it wasn't really appropriate in COVID, it wasn't really possible. But that really is where you have to shed this idea that you're a startup. You're not a startup anymore, and you, you know, you need to reinvent yourself constantly, especially as a CEO. You've got to stay ahead of the business, or at least up to where the stage of the business is. And so I basically, if anyone says startup, I say, No, we're not a startup anymore. We're scale-up, right? It's a different—scale-up is still very different. We're not a mature corporate business by any stretch. But you have to start to adopt what you are or what you're about to become. Otherwise, like if you don't manifest that correctly, you'll just keep doing more of what worked in the past, and actually that will become something that sort of actually becomes a burden on the business, right? So you've got to put a bit more structure in, got to have a bit more process, kind of go through the org chart. Like as a CEO, you've got to resist kind of, you know. So it's a fine line. Like you still can't lose all of your natural instincts for shooting from the hip and stuff like that, but maybe you do become a bit more data-driven, a bit more process-oriented. It's a bit of a balance, that. But yeah, so what's next, I guess, is really— Fleshing out what that scale-up version looks like without losing our velocity, our creativity, you know, our product focus, our customer centricity, all of those kind of things. And then increasingly, you know, going from like 20 million to 50 million ARR, you know, the reality is like you need new channels to market. Like that's where partnerships starts to become a thing, strategic partnerships. You're also probably working with bigger enterprise clients, maybe with larger annual contract values, and that's where you're getting more into the world of like, you know, legal contract negotiation, MSAs, procurement teams, extended sales cycles. You know, it's a really different game, but it's still an exciting and interesting game. But yeah, I think getting fit and ready for that and embracing that and sort of putting the past as fond memories as they are in that memory box and be like, those days are over. We're new now, and you've got to push that through the culture. Not everyone wants that. Yeah, difficult. Yeah, 100%. Let's deep dive into a topic. Cool. Topic around money. It's always a good topic.