Building and sustaining a successful business is a spiritual marathon rather than a 100-meter sprint. For spirituality and business are closely linked. Spirituality is about your own growth as a valuable, loving and caring human being. Your soul pulls you towards being valuable to others and making a difference in their lives. You are called on this earth to deliver value to others in a unique and different way than anyone else. Upon finding and communicating this value to others, you will become a brand. The Business part shows itself in the way of getting a reward in the form of money.
Related: How Seeking Value Is More Sustainable Than Pursuing Profits
In order to make a sustainable success, the spiritual dimension must be added to your business. Achieving business goals can be rewarding but it might not be fulfilling unless spirituality is considered and applied. Spirituality is to look at your life in the most profound way possible. Namely, looking at the reason you are here on earth: is it to find out what’s your gift that can contribute to the welfare of others and, in so doing, you will be rewarded for the service that you render to others. So, your No.1 job is to have a mission; that is, adding value to others. Parallel to that, comes your vision of how to sustain your business out of this value.
Being mesmerized by the entrepreneurial overnight success, aspiring entrepreneurs strive to short-cut the process. The failure-type entrepreneur is obsessed with finding an answer to this nagging question: How long does it take to make a startup business successful? Being a mentor for startups for more than 2 decades, I’ve been asked this question repeatedly. There is no clear-cut answer for such a question. For building a startup business revolved around milestones and a process.
Mastering the timeline of each of the coming 3 phases helps the sustainability of your start-up business. The timeline I will refer to in each stage is just an approximation – some stages may last longer, and others may cut short. However, it’s important that you not get discouraged during your early years of development. I assure if you’ve truly found an opportunity in the market and remain disciplined and consistent through each stage, you can move forward and experience predictable revenue growth. The 3-phase framework is first Finding value, the second is Growing the seeds, and the third is Maturing.
In the first phase; that is, Finding value, the main problems of the business are how to obtain customers and deliver the product or service contracted for. The viability of the business is dependent solely on having sales to cover the considerable cash demands of this start-up phase. But sales won’t be achieved without coming up with a unique value proposition that sets you apart from competition and helps you achieve profitability. The timeline of this phase is from 0 to 3 years. Research and development are key at this stage.
Gaining a competitive advantage is a cornerstone in the success of this phase. This is where R&D comes into play. It compasses activities such as market research, visibility studies, product design, prototype development and testing. Capitalizing on such activities is more likely to help startups develop unique and breakthrough solutions to existing problems in the market. Those who invest time and resources into R&D can gain a deeper understanding of market needs and identify gaps where their products or services can make a competitive edge in the market. This phase takes lots of iterations to get your business off the ground.
The second phase is Growing the seeds. You must go deep into understanding the market you are in, the customers and competition. Generating value is dependent on this understanding. The more scalable your idea is, the larger your market will be, the closer your relationship with your customers. You are asked in this phase to define your vision and mission, establish key milestones and develop a schedule for reaching these goals. Having a mentor in this stage can accelerate your growth and provide you with guidance. You are developing a prototype at this stage. Investors at this phase – angels and Venture capitalists – are taking on a lot of risk and want to be convinced that you have a solid product, an identifiable market and a business plan.
This phase takes no less than 5 years just to get pointed towards a real business. You keep refining every aspect of your business such as customer acquisition, product development, unit economics and the like. This phase, as a whole, takes from 4 to 10 years.
The third phase is the Maturity and growth phase. The major part of it is scaling. Scaling your business and your team as well – the right people in the right place. Scaling a company is a highly strategic endeavor. But scaling must be taking with a grain of salt. For Scaling up too quickly could mean burning through your resources faster than revenue comes in. If you scale too slowly, you risk not being able to supply growing demand or fail to meet deadlines.
As a founder, your role is to grow your team, and, in so doing, you will be evolving in the process. You have to lean on the right people, including startup mentors, to reach your goals. This phase is a test for the startup’s capacity of leadership. A leader got to have a vision of where he wants to take his people. The measures of thriving in the phase is how rightly you are positioned in the marketplace and to what extent you have predictable and consistent revenues. This phase takes from 10 to 15 years.
The true measure of your business success is its sustainability. But it won’t be achieved until finding your competitive edge, iterating your prototype and launching it into the market, and, lastly, scaling your idea to larger markets. By mastering the dynamics of these 3 phases, your business is bound, not only to secure its viability short term, but also its sustainability long term.
