The art of scaling a tech business
Most small companies live in hope of attracting the attention of much larger established businesses.
Most small companies live in hope of attracting the attention of much larger established businesses. Not just because they help to provide a stamp of approval which can be used to attract other large customers, but also because of the fact they have the potential to enable a SME to massively scale their business by gaining access to the large company’s customer base.
That, combined with venturing into overseas markets are daunting experiences for any business, but done successfully they provide the sort of rocket fuel to growth of which any founder can only hope to dream of achieving.
In our experience of attracting large scale partners, we have a very clear proposition, which is to enable large data owners to sell profitably into the high- volume, low-value end of the market. We understand many of the issues of selling data into a self-serve environment and know the value that our platform and experience can add to these businesses. Recognising that many of the large postal service providers are experiencing a significant decline in their traditional postal operations, we have seen a great strategic opportunity to partner with these businesses.
As a result, over the last 12 months we have made a significant decision to scale for growth. With a scalable business model, we have recently started to put into place the building blocks to achieve our ambitions. This has included, moving to a new £2 million office in the centre of Worcester that accommodates double the current headcount, establishing a senior management team who have been tasked with delivering growth, and finally setting up rigorous systems and processes to create greater accountability across the business.
Recognising that Postcode Anywhere has developed a fantastic platform for growth, we have put measures in place to make this happen. Earlier this year we joined The London Stock Exchange’s ELITE programme which offers businesses the skills to adapt and shape for growth and increase their visibility and attractiveness to potential investors. We have identified two very progressive peer companies who are at the leading edge of using data to improve their businesses. I am in the process of arranging meetings with these to again explore what our respective companies are doing in this area and to test some of our assumptions on a new Big Data application that we will be looking to launch later this year. Ultimately, the ELITE programme will be an important cornerstone to help facilitate our ambitious strategy and prepare for the next stage of growth.
Guy will be speaking at Tech Entrepreneurs Week in London on Wednesday, 16th July 2014