If you are planning to start the growth ascent for your business, here are three big questions you need to ask yourself:

Is my product or service innovative enough to get traction?

Do I have the cash available to support growth?

Are there sufficient processes and a team in place to manage the growth?

Innovation

Founders can suffer from myopia and see their creation as perfect. Be objective (or get someone else to be objective for you) and ask yourself if this is the business idea that’s going to thrust you to the summit. You’re going to spent considerable time and money doing this – is it right, does it need a tweak, a pivot, major-surgery or a think-again?

Money

Cash is king and you only need to run out of it once for the business to fail? If your business is immediately cash generative, then the more you grow, the more cash you’ll have. But that’s unusual. What you’re selling will have a cost per sale, which may comprise the cost to buy and/or transform the product or service. Then you've got the cost of promoting it. These are typically upfront costs. If you have to spend money before you receive money from your customers, then the faster you grow the more cash you’ll need. So it’s important to ask yourself how much you’ll need and where that cash is coming from? And keep a close eye on your cash runway.

Team & Processes

If you dramatically increase your sales and don’t have enough (or the right) people to service your customers, or your processes are not robust enough, then you’ll have unhappy customers. And they have a habit of making their complaints public. Take a critical look at the processes you have in place – it may be OK to run a small lifestyle business on a spreadsheet, but does that still work when sales are streaming in? And what about your team? Great in the early days when it’s all chaos and pizza? But mature enough to handle shed-loads of business? And then, is the office big enough? What about the internet connection? Are our suppliers able to cope with more business? A thousand and one more questions to ask.

This is one of those times when failure is not an option - you have to excel at each of these growth requirements. You may be eyeing the summit of K2, but you’ll break your toe on the first rock unless you get this right. But it’s a hell of a climb and the view up there is breath-taking.