How to identify an ‘SME teenager’
More important than your revenue is whether you can identify with any of the traits common to teenagers and many mid-sized businesses: They suffer unpredictable growth spurts and occasional breakouts; they’re occasionally noncommunicative, sometimes think no one understands them, and have started to “sleep in”. Here we look at each trait and how to deal with it, so it works for you not against you.1. Unpredictable growth spurts

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Don’t wait for the wave. Create simple, easy to execute scale-up plans ahead of time to quickly respond to and make use of demand spikes. Then try and anticipate when the next one will come, based on analysis of past data. You can also use this data to pinpoint when on the uptick you ran out of marketing or delivery resources and had to back off. This information forms a reporting marker that triggers your scale-up plan in enough time to avoid having to back off.2. Breakouts
A teenager brand has outgrown the crazy “oh wow, everything is leaking and there’s not enough duct tape in the world” reality of a start-up. But they’re not so far out of the woods that the wheels don’t come off in some areas, some of the time.Make it work for you
Create a method of triaging your breakouts. Something simple so you can quickly assess the potential damage. You might want to look at: • Scale: How big is the actual problem in its subject/nature? • Scope: How far does the effect of the problem continue? A team, the whole business, your whole customer base? • Duration: How long is it likely to be an issue for if we respond appropriately?3. Communication

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Check that your marketing budget is appropriate for your size and market situation. Then check that you have a marketer of sufficient skill and seniority to be entrusted with this budget. Finally, get out of their way and reduce your input to holding them accountable for helping the brand to prosper and grow market share.4. Understanding
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Find partners and customers who really understand the stage you’re at right now. Businesses who work with businesses like yours are better placed to support you through the inevitable growing pains as you journey towards the big leagues. And you’re more likely to retain customers whose expectations match what you’re currently able to offer, rather than chasing the dream business you’re just not ready for, only to crash and burn on the delivery.5. Sleeping in
We often say how mid-sized brands should use their relative agility to pivot around their bigger rivals. And it’s true that they both can and should. But they need to guard against the inroads that scaling up tends to make in this dynamism.The bigger your brand gets and the more like a big company you become, you’ll necessarily add more layers of people, processes and systems to help you run effectively as you scale.The danger is that, when not properly implemented and managed, these things can slow you down and lead to your business “sleeping in” whilst your smaller start-up rivals are already up and cracking.
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Most businesses put a huge amount of time and effort into evaluating and planning a change before they implement it. What far fewer do is evaluate whether the expected benefits of the change are fully realised and even fewer than that actually go on to reverse changes that don’t live up to expectations. Those who do all 3 stay far nimbler for far longer than their similarly sized rivals.Share this story