Business Life Cycle

The 7 Stages of the Business Life Cycle

Business Life Cycle

Your business is changing. With the passage of time, your company will go through various stages of the business life cycle. Learn what upcoming focuses, challenges and financing sources you will need to succeed.
A business goes through stages of development similar to the cycle of life for the human race. Parenting strategies that work for your toddler cannot be applied to your teenager. The same goes for your small business. It will be faced with a different cycle throughout its life. What you focus on today will change and require different approaches to be successful.

Seed

The seed stage of your business life cycle is when your business is just a thought or an idea. This is the very conception or birth of a new business.

• Challenge: Most seed stage companies will have to overcome the challenge of market acceptance and pursue one niche opportunity. Do not spread money and time resources too thin.
• Focus: At this stage of the business the focus is on matching the business opportunity with your skills, experience and passions. Other focal points include: deciding on a business ownership structure, finding professional advisors, and business planning.
• Money Sources: Early in the business life cycle with no proven market or customers the business will rely on cash from owners, friends and family. Other potential sources include suppliers, customers, government grants and banks.

Start-Up

Your business is born and now exists legally. Products or services are in production and you have your first customers.

• Challenge: If your business is in the start-up life cycle stage, it is likely you have overestimated money needs and the time to market. The main challenge is not to burn through what little cash you have. You need to learn what profitable needs your clients have and do a reality check to see if your business is on the right track.
• Focus: Start-ups require establishing a customer base and market presence along with tracking and conserving cash flow.
• Money Sources: Owner, friends, family, suppliers, customers, grants, and banks.

Growth

Your business has made it through the toddler years and is now a child. Revenues and customers are increasing with many new opportunities and issues. Profits are strong, but competition is surfacing.

• Challenge: The biggest challenge growth companies face is dealing with the constant range of issues bidding for more time and money. Effective management is required and a possible new business plan. Learn how to train and delegate to conquer this stage of development.
• Focus: Growth life cycle businesses are focused on running the business in a more formal fashion to deal with the increased sales and customers. Better accounting and management systems will have to be set-up. New employees will have to be hired to deal with the influx of business.
• Money Sources: Banks, profits, partnerships, grants and leasing options.

Established

Your business has now matured into a thriving company with a place in the market and loyal customers. Sales growth is not explosive but manageable. Business life has become more routine.

• Challenge: It is far too easy to rest on your laurels during this life stage. You have worked hard and have earned a rest but the marketplace is relentless and competitive. Stay focused on the bigger picture. Issues like the economy, competitors or changing customer tastes can quickly end all you have work for.
• Focus: An established life cycle company will be focused on improvement and productivity. To compete in an established market, you will require better business practices along with automation and outsourcing to improve productivity.
• Money Sources: Profits, banks, investors and government.

Expansion

This life cycle is characterized by a new period of growth into new markets and distribution channels. This stage is often the choice of the business owner to gain a larger market share and find new revenue and profit channels.

• Challenge: Moving into new markets requires the planning and research of a seed or start-up stage business. Focus should be on businesses that complement your existing experience and capabilities. Moving into unrelated businesses can be disastrous.
• Focus: Add new products or services to existing markets or expand existing business into new markets and customer types.
• Money Sources: Joint ventures, banks, licensing, new investors and partners.
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Mature

Year over year sales and profits tend to be stable, however competition remains fierce. Eventually sales start to fall off and a decision is needed whether to expand or exit the company.

• Challenge: Businesses in the mature stage of the life cycle will be challenged with dropping sales, profits, and negative cash flow. The biggest issue is how long the business can support a negative cash flow. Ask is it time to move back to the expansion stage or move on to the final life cycle stage...exit.
• Focus: Search for new opportunities and business ventures. Cutting costs and finding ways to sustain cash flow are vital for the mature stage.
• Money Sources: Suppliers, customers, owners, and banks.

Exit

This is the big opportunity for your business to cash out on all the effort and years of hard work. Or it can mean shutting down the business.

• Challenge: Selling a business requires your realistic valuation. It may have been years of hard work to build the company, but what is its real value in the current market place. If you decide to close your business, the challenge is to deal with the financial and psychological aspects of a business loss.
• Focus: Get a proper valuation on your company. Look at your business operations, management and competitive barriers to make the company worth more to the buyer. Set-up legal buy-sell agreements along with a business transition plan.
• Money Sources: Find a business valuation partner. Consult with your accountant and financial advisors for the best tax strategy to sell or close-out down business.

 

 

 

Platform-as-a-Service: 6 Ways PaaS Will Change The Enterprise

Guest author Bart Copeland is CEO of ActiveState.

Jetpacks, flying cars, hybrid cloud. Which one will be ubiquitous in two years? Here’s a hint: It’s the one that doesn’t involve personal air travel.

In two years, the cloud-computing-enabled enterprise will have the enviable luxury to take much for granted, including accelerated time to market, seamless deployment, true polyglot coding and agile-as-you-want development.

And the technology that will enable that bright future? Here’s another hint: It starts with “private PaaS” or private Platform- as-a-Service. Think of private PaaS as cloud middleware for the enterprise — Platform-as-a-Service technology for on-premise service delivery behind a firewall, or an operating system for an enterprise private cloud.

Here are six ways private PaaS will change the enterprise cloud space by 2015:

1. Mobile apps will drive enterprise cloud and private PaaS adoption.

 Two years from now, the biggest driver for cloud adoption won’t be traditional applications, it’ll be mobile apps. Disparate workforces already make Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) a cost of doing business for the enterprise: More types of enterprise work will require more types of mobile applications. And that will burden IT leaders mandated with managing the cloud. To retain control (and sanity), those IT leaders will embrace private PaaS technologies to provide integrated application management of mobile (and Web and cloud) applications.

2. Private clouds will dominate the enterprise market for now… but hybrids will win in the end.

Marketers spin idealized tales of cross-cloud hybrid love, with capacity-enabling bursts to the public cloud, easy multi-datacenter application administration, better security management, and redundancy/failover operational models abstracted from the developers and employees doing the actual work. It’s a great, achievable vision. But for most enterprises, that hybrid cloud vision is still two years away. Which is why they’re investing in private PaaS architectures now. Today’s enterprise cloud adopters see private cloud — and in particular, private PaaS technology — as the path to tomorrow’s hybrid cloud glory.

3. Smaller 'public PaaS' players will dwindle as Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) subsumes PaaS.

To differentiate themselves against commoditization, IaaS service providers will continue to incorporate PaaS technology into their infrastructure service offerings. Service breadth will expand, prices will fall and small business will embrace the low-cost public cloud. But those competitive pricing scenario will challenge small standalone public PaaS providers as VC funds dry up and competitors either partner with or get absorbed into larger cloud-services corporations.

4. 2013 PaaS purchase criterion: deployment acceleration. 2015 PaaS purchase criteria: administrative control, true polyglot development, easy extensibility to Big Data.

In the PaaS world, 2013 will be the year of rapid application deployment: Enterprise private PaaS adopters will see their cloud application deployment cycles reduced from weeks or months to just minutes. In two years, cloud adopters will take that speed-tomarket for granted. As a result, enterprise cloud adopters will evaluate private PaaS technology not just for how it accelerates workflow, but for how it impacts the bottom line. In 2015, private PaaS technologies will offer even easier administrative control, support for development in any language, seamless integration to corporate applications (particularly big-data databases), and hybrid cloud capabilities.

5. Beyond polyglot, 'anyglot'' development will move apps forward in ways we can’t yet imagine.

In today’s cloud technology market, enterprise developers must often choose between their preferred development language and the development language dictated by their IaaS/PaaS solution. When infrastructure services (whether public or private) mandate development environment, it’s the coders who suffer, and they’re the ones who must adapt to the new world order. In some cases, that can mean learning new languages and recoding (or even dumping) legacy applications. But two years from now, we’ll look back on inconveniences like that and laugh. Envision truly polyglot cloud middleware. Applications developed in multiple languages. True cloud application portability. Both developers and cloud managers (DevOps) collaborating. Dogs and cats living together in harmony. Really.

6. Agile development will be so agile we’ll need a new name for it (“SuperAgile?”).

Tomorrow’s agility will make today’s agility look laughably slow. In 2015, we’ll enjoy polyglot application development and dynamic deployment. With those capabilities will come newfound agility… not just accelerated nimbleness for cat-herders, but flexibility: Developers can work in the (fast) way that’s right for them. More apps, better apps, delivered to market faster.