An Industry Canada analysis shows that the percent of business failures tend to increase with the age of the organization.1 Their data shows a survival rate of 98% after the first year, declining to 78% after 3 years, 63% after 5 years, and only 43% after 10 years.  In our experience, we see many organizations that start well and have high motivation to take them into a couple of years before issues start to become visible.  Typically, the start up principles have a great idea or great service and they are highly skilled in that area; however, starting a business and running a business are two very different things.  They require different skills, more planning, and the ability to constantly adapt to growth and market changes.  This correlates to a small qualitative study conducted in 2018 that looked at high growth companies and investigated the challenges they faced that resulted from fast growth².  This study identified several key challenges including:

• Lack of a strategic plan to guide decision making 
• Poor communications within the organization
• Operations challenges (scalability, systems, processes, quality)
• Underperforming or ineffective Marketing / Advertising / Sales
• Maintaining a high functioning executive team
• Recruitment and retention of staff

One example of several of these issues coming to light is represented in the following article by Andrea Sakiyama Kennedy in the Ottawa Business Journal, “Trial by fire: Local BBQ entrepreneur navigates business by letting go” .  This represents a typical story of entrepreneurs who start their business, manage the business, and operates in the business all at the same time.  It works for a short period of time but soon the entrepreneur recognizes that they can not lead, manage, or grow the company when they are stuck “in the company”.  The entrepreneur highlighted, needed to move away from the day to day activities to manage the business without being immersed in the business.  Challenges such as strategic planning, communication, increasing the efficiency of operations, improving sales, and recruiting and retaining staff can’t be accomplished without stepping out of the daily activities and, in many cases, bringing on skill sets that can manage each key task.