Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW) takes place from 12 – 16 November 2018 and in an emerging market that needs to create millions of new jobs – most of which can only come from SME’s that Scale Up – this is a very significant week, representing the main hope of a more prosperous and more fair future.
But scaling up can be daunting. Out of every 1,000 businesses, 10 have the potential to scale and create wealth. That’s just 1%. What’s worse, of the elite 1%, 20-30% will make it to the ‘Promised Land’ while the rest get stuck in No Man’s Land – the Bermuda Triangle of growth – or fail
As entrepreneurs on this daunting journey, we need inspiration! Happily, SA has plenty of inspiring, award winning entrepreneurs to learn from.
Here, 10X-e shares insights from some of the award-winning Scale Ups on the 10X Scale Up Accelerator.
But who are 10X-e, and what is the 10X Scale Up Accelerator? 10X-e exists to help elite Scale Up novices to 10X their business. “Most of the best young entrepreneurs fail to scale first time around. We’re here to fix that” says Goldberg, 10X-e’s Founder.
10X-e partners with Sponsors to provide world class Scale Up support to SA’s highest potential ventures. Recently, 10X-e and AlphaCode came together to accelerate SA’s top Fintech Scale Ups.
“We offer a tried-and-tested 12-part formula for rapid growth and it all starts with a Business X-Ray which essentially exposes the strengths and weaknesses of your business, to ensure that the foundation of your business is solid enough to handle the rapid growth. If there are weak links that need work, the X-Ray will reveal them”.
Jason says that the company deals with ‘disruptors’ who disrupt markets and industries by scaling innovative new offerings or business models, typically leveraging new technology or new market circumstances that make new ways of doing business both possible and better.
Building Award Winning Businesses
“Many of our clients are achieving impressive things, and we would like to pay tribute to just some of these”.
“Click2Sure is innovating the insurance space with a full stack digital insurance platform that enables them to do things like insure your new cell phone at the point of purchase – whether that is in a store or online. Launched in 2017 and founded by serial entrepreneurs Daniel Guasco and Jacques Van Niekerk, Click2Sure is currently on the AlphaCode 10X Program” says Jason. The company recently announced their new venture with Greenlight Re Innovations – a specialist property and casualty reinsurance company from the Cayman Islands. This will add rocket fuel to their international expansion”.
A2d24 – part of the September 2018 10X Cohort – recently won Innovator of the Year award in Sanlam / Business Partners Entrepreneur of the Year awards. Muhammad, the Founder and ex-McKinsey consultant, has led the firm in developing an innovative app for Emergency Medical Services in Gauteng which reduces ambulance dispatch time and saves lives, a predictive model for a mobile phone network service provider in Cameroon, and a mobile application to assist in malaria prevention in Mozambique. More recently, they have created an unrivalled Internet Of Things Point Of Sale device to help merchants grow sales and improve service.
InvoiceWorx received a third-place prize of R750 000 from SAB Foundation’s 2018 Social Innovation and Disability Empowerment Awards for Spaza Credit – a micro-finance solution for retailers in the informal sector.
The Spark Education Group of Schools – on the 10X Program since 2017 – are transforming education using technology, preparing kids for a more complex and technology-dominated future. They have walked away with no less than 9 business awards for the business itself and the founding members.
So, what’s the secret to Scaling?
“Ask any successful entrepreneur and they will tell you: Scaling is incredibly hard!”
Jason says that this is for a lot of reasons; one being that as you scale is that you build up ‘organisational debt’ – the silent Scale Up killer. “‘Organisational debt’ is essentially a backlog of ‘Capacity’ (scalable systems, processes, skills, people, and general ‘fixes’) needed for your organisation to work well at your current scale”.
He continues saying: “The more you scale, the more capacity you need. 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”.
To kill your Organisational debt before it kills you, the first thing you need is to see it. “That’s why we created the Scale Up X-Ray – to provide X-Ray vision into your organisational debt. It will show you the systems and processes that will be the weak links that break when you scale, so that you can fix them before they break”.
Scale Up X-Ray
The start of any Scale Up journey and one that every one of the 10xe award winning businesses undertook, looks to expose the business and identify any fatal flaws and great strengths prior to the program. The Scale Up X-Ray will help you see clearly:
- Your company lifecycle stage and most important next milestones to prioritise
- Your current business complexity and required level of organisational developmental
- Your actual level of business development, relative to that required, in each of the core Scale Up functions
- Your Scale Up weak links –your most urgent business development priorities
- Automated recommendations on how to address your Scale up weak links.
If you are scaling and want to focus on the most important priorities, including fixing weak links that could kill your business, apply for a fully sponsored Scale Up X-Ray now.
About 10X-e:
Our team has helped some of the country’s most exciting high growth businesses scale up and reach their maximum potential. We tailor make workshops to the specific needs of you, your team, and your business, all facilitated by seasoned Scale Up leaders, to help you solve your most complex problems and remove the hurdles to 10X growth.
For more info on 10X-e, and to join their Path to Scale Workshop being held in Cape Town in February 2019.
