Scale-up support
So, what is scale-up? We describe it as when a business or organisation is facing such a high rate of change or growth (or both) that the existing organisational structures are no longer working or fit for purpose. This tends to affect small companies most as they look to grow from 10-50 employees and double in size each year; where size can mean anything, for example gross sales, number of employees or products taken to market.
Scaling up typically coincides with further financial investment and brings with it a need for the business to meet not just its own pre-investment business objectives but also those of the investor during and following the scale up programme.
As you start to scale-up you can no longer rely on word of mouth to define your company culture, vision or customer-facing and internal processes. Your employees will need to start taking on specific roles and become specialists and not generalists, and you will need the HR policies and procedures to hire and manage them. You will need to manage your money and your stakeholders, your customers and your staff, and you will need to establish operational and production systems that can grow with you, all this while maintaining the integrity of your business and your critical business assets.
Why use it?
Scaling-up can expose your business or organisation to a degree of instability that you have not experienced before and which could threaten the security of your day-to-day operations and ongoing growth. A loss or breach of customer data, for example, whether as a result of an external attack or a failure of internal controls, could prove hugely damaging.
Getting the right structures, processes and people in place can take time and, in the meantime, you cannot do everything yourself. If you are to meet and exceed your ambitious growth targets you will need to address any shortfalls quickly otherwise your scale-up could fail to achieve sustainability as a business.
What do we do?
Our Principals and Associates are highly skilled in all areas of business-driven security and have worked extensively in start-ups, scale-ups and large corporates. We understand the need for the security controls in a scale-up to be cost-effective, proportionate and business enabling so we follow a business-driven approach using SABSA™.
SABSA™ helps us to define critical business requirements both pre and post scale-up from the perspective of the company and any investors or external stakeholders and ensure that they are complementary and consistent.
We support and augment your team at critical times in the development of your business or organisation, checking that change is planned and managed in line with your business requirements so that you can scale-up successfully.
While a security issue is always a business issue, a business issue always has a security component. Our approach ensures we provide a risk appropriate response regardless of the starting point.
As you grow, it’s possible that you will hit some bumps in the road in terms of your recruitment; not every employee will work out as you hoped and this can lead to an insider-threat risk. Our insider-threat and security experts can help you mitigate and prepare for these risks and, if the worst happens, help you investigate and remediate any incidents.
You may need to work out of temporary premises in shared spaces or you may need to meet industry specific standards. Our physical security experts can help you create secure spaces for your employees and facilities and obtain the necessary accreditations.
And if the overall security of your business is at risk, we have experts in operational and financial management who know what it takes to stay in control of a scale-up, and how this information needs to be communicated to your stakeholders.
We would like to talk to you
If you would like to know more about Scale-up support please call us. We will schedule a free-of charge initial exploratory teleconference between us so we can understand your requirements and learn more of your needs and objectives.
We use this initial discussion to draw up a short proposal in the form of a letter of engagement that lets us work together quickly on a series of short time and budget-bound sprints for your approval.