Scaling Ventures: Developing the Playbook for Profitable Growth

Growing a business can be a complex challenge that touches every area of the firm, presenting obstacles that test even highly experienced leaders. Scaling Ventures: Developing the Playbook for Profitable Growth takes a holistic view of the process, incorporating strategy, finance, and leadership. These three pivotal elements, and how they work together to create a viable plan for growth, form the foundation of the program.

Scaling Ventures offers solutions to the critical challenges faced by growing companies, and will show you how to put your learning directly into practice. By the end of the program, you will know how to determine which approach to growth is most viable for your organization, transition for that growth, and be able to communicate an action plan that addresses strategic, financial, and leadership concerns.

Program Experience

Highlights and Key Outcomes

In Scaling Ventures you will:

• Determine whether or not your company’s existing operational structure and capabilities are ready to scale
• Learn how to stress test current organizational structure and processes to discover readiness to grow
• Identify and measure the key performance indicators needed for scaling
• Create a financially viable, scalable strategic plan
• Understand the capital requirements needed to grow and how to attain them
• Balance people, culture, and processes to achieve successful strategy execution
• Explore how rapidly growing organizations best attract, retain, and develop its employees
• Integrate a framework for your marketing brand strategy as you scale
• Expand and adapt your ability to scale globally

Experience and Impact

Scaling Ventures takes you from start to finish as you explore whether the timing is right for your organization and then determine how to move forward by creating an actionable plan. Through this program you will discover the key challenges firms face when trying to scale, including the relationship between people and processes, and move from tactical, short-term opportunistic thinking to a long-term focused vision.

Scaling Ventures, which contains some curriculum from Wharton’s internationally recognized Scale School Workshop, will enable participants to tackle both sides of the growth coin — people and processes. Specifically, this program will help participants assess their firm’s current organizational structure and determine how to resolve the common tension that exists in growing companies between hiring people for skills or for cultural fit. This program will also reveal what type of organizational culture a company needs to have to grow and how to define the role of the company’s founder or owner/operator as the firm embarks on this new phase of growth.

The program’s cross-functional approach brings together the strategic, financial, and leadership concerns of expanding a business operations. You will consider whether your current strategy is scalable from both the execution and financial viewpoints, and also examine the risks inherent to your plan and analyze how to build the right portfolio of processes, assets, and people to address those risks.

Through case studies, a business simulation, and breakout sessions, you will analyze your organization and apply new tools during each day of the program. Then in small discussion groups, you will develop an actionable plan to scale your organization.

Session topics include:

• Avoiding Explosions: Building and Leading Successful Teams
• Balancing People and Processes
• Metrics for Scaling
• Managing Assets for Growth
• Local to Global: Managing Global Networks (simulation)
• Scaling through Innovation
• Financing the Growing Business
• Scaling Up Quality: Hiring, Leading, and Organizing for Success
• Value Creation in Fast Growth Companies