On this month's Ready to Rise webinar, someone told a story that's stuck with me since about a business that they had encountered that was twelve years old but was still being introduced as a startup. Not as a throwaway line, but as how that business explained away the fact that there's no real process for onboarding, nothing documented about how anything actually gets done, nothing written down that would let someone else step in and keep it running.
Twelve years is long enough to have been through a few market cycles, a handful of key hires who've come and gone, probably a pivot or two.
Whatever “startup” meant when the business began, it stopped meaning that a long time ago.
Agility isn't the same as undisciplined
The word startup carries a lot of romance, moving fast, staying scrappy, not getting weighed down by process, and there's truth in that. Early on, you don't want a business bogged down in approval chains and documentation for its own sake. Speed and instinct are genuine advantages when you're small.
But somewhere along the way, that same instinct can start covering for something else. Not having a system stops being a choice and starts being a gap, and it's a gap that's easier to leave alone than admit to, because admitting to it means someone has to build the thing.
Agility means you can change direction quickly because you understand your business well enough to do it. Undisciplined means you're moving fast because nobody's ever slowed down long enough to ask what's actually holding the place together.
What actually needs to change
We spend a lot of time on exactly this in Module 3 of Ready to Rise, because scale doesn't come from vision alone, it comes from systems, stamina and structure.
Five things tend to separate a business that's genuinely still finding its feet from one that's just avoiding growing up:
1. Whether the way you sell, onboard, invoice and deliver is written down anywhere, or only exists in your head and the heads of the two people who've been there since the start;
2. Whether you're still the bottleneck on decisions that shouldn't need you anymore;
3. Whether the way you communicate as a five-person team is still the way you communicate now the business has grown;
4. Whether you actually know your cash position and where it's heading, rather than working it out from the bank balance each month; and
5. Whether the pace that got you here is still sustainable for the people doing the work, or whether burnout has quietly become the price of admission.
None of these are dramatic on their own. That's exactly why they're so easy to leave alone. A business can run for years on instinct and good will, right up until the moment it can't, and by then the systems that would have caught the problem were never built.
What the label actually protects
Calling yourself a startup at twelve years in isn't really about identity, it's protection. As long as you're still a startup, the lack of a handover plan, the fact that only you know how invoicing actually works, the absence of anything resembling a strategy on a page, none of it needs fixing. It's just what startups are like.
Except it isn't, not after this long, and dropping the label doesn't mean losing what made the business work in the first place. The instinct and the willingness to move fast can stay exactly as they are. What changes is that they stop being the only thing holding the business up.
What would it change if you stopped calling your business a startup, and started building it like the business it's actually become?
This is what we work through in Module 3 of Ready to Rise, the five things that actually determine whether growth holds together or falls apart. If you're not yet in the community, the link is here.
Responses