A lot of medium- to enterprise-sized companies look for software, hardware, and data center companies they will not outgrow, or at least won’t feel the pain of outgrowing too quickly. If you have ever taken a step back and watched a venture capital (VC) firm make an investment in a startup, a lot of the time they are looking for companies that have not made poor management decisions regarding their scalability potential and their growth strategy. If you are not planning to take on VC, or ramping up to sell your company, it would still be smart to look further down the road at the big picture in anticipation for rapid growth.
Ask yourself and your team the following questions:
First, if your business was to grow to 10 times your current revenue in the next 5 months, what changes will you have to make? Would this growth put you out of business like a DOS attack? Could it cause more harm to your company than good? I experienced this first hand with a company that captured 30,000 new customers in less than 1 month and made a lot of changes for the following years. Second, will the current software, hardware, and platforms you have in place be able to take on this rapid growth or will you have a lot of down time? Will you need to redo all the hard work you have built up to over the past few years, or have you made the right decisions in purchasing and implementation? Finally, do you have your files, documents, and data in a full disaster recovery solution, or will you wait until it’s too late? If the answer to any of the questions above is “kind of” or “no,” you might want to revisit how you are doing business and realign your priorities for success. Venture capital is a great thing if you are prepared for rapid growth. If you are not prepared, you will notice your VC firm will either put you in contact with the correct companies or they will pass your product up if you are too far behind, or unwilling to make the correct changes. A great all-in-one document management, file sharing, disaster recovery, and eSigning platform available is eFileCabinet. The organization it affords your company will look great to potential investors and will show that you are planning for future growth. To get a 15-minute demo of eFileCabinet, simply fill out the contact form on this page.