Ask Roshan: What's Preventing SMEs From Scaling Up?

Question to “Ask Roshan”

What is preventing small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) from scaling up?

Excerpt from Roshan’s answer

Understand that there are five stages of an SME life cycle: start-up, survival, success, take-off and maturity. Many SME leaders find themselves struggling to scale up once they reach an initial success (stage three). The four contributing key factors are:

1. leadership: lack of clarity among employees because of conflicting leadership goals and business goals.
2. business model: a prototype that worked needs to be replicated in multiple transactions to reach another level, and it can be humanly impossible.
3. culture: renewing mindsets of employees can be a challenge when they are already set on an old belief system.
4. process or structure: some existing structures or processes may be limiting your growth plans.

Watch this video for his full response:

 
Missed out our previous episode? Check this out: Ask Roshan: How Does One Influence People?
 

How this show came about?
This TV segment called “Ask Roshan” came about when Matt Naylor, Hafiz Hori & Roshan Thiran were travelling to Johor for a gig with Citibank. During the drive over, Matt set up Facebook Live and took questions from everyone via Facebook to Roshan who spontaneously answered them. This resulted in hundreds of questions popping up and getting live answers from Roshan and even some of the Citibank leaders, including their CEO, Lee Lung Nien.

 
Read also: 4 Constraints Preventing Your Organisation From Becoming World-Class
 

Be sure to drop your questions in the comments below and we’ll try our best to get Roshan to answer them in the next episode! Follow him directly on Facebook for more questions and answers. To follow with him on LinkedIn, click here.