Hyper-growth stage of business development can be a roller coaster ride with unforeseen challenges, complexity and ambiguity in every step.

Congratulations on making it to the next phase of your startup! As a CEO of an early stage venture, you have achieved a significant milestone if your startup has been able to find the product market fit and now moved into the stage of hyper-growth.

As the historical data suggests, 50% of businesses fail before the 5-year anniversary. What is more interesting is 90% of the businesses fail in their growth stage. So if you are the CEO if a hyper-growth business, here are a few important tips for you to keep in mind as you champion your company and organization towards a successful business.

Ajay Singh Founder, Stoodnt.com, a career guidance portal, strongly advocates for building the right team, as he feels it is critical for the leader of an organization to hire complementary team members and build the right leadership team, including the consideration of whether you are the right leader to transition the startup from current stage to the next stage.

What You Do Now Impacts Your Organization In The Long-run

Singh also suggests using cash productively. “If your company is growing at an exponential rate, you need to invest money in hiring, development and driving growth of the business. Having sufficient cash to run and grow operations is one of more important task, so make sure you have a good CFO keeping an eye on cash flow, investment requirements, expenses and fund raising. Approximately 80% of startups die because of poor cash flow,” he explained.

Staying focused on the customer is extremely critical. Your customers have bought your product or service and made your company successful so far. “Do not take your eyes off from servicing and keeping your customer satisfied. They are your biggest assets when you are a young company. If you are not able to service and meet their needs, they will go to a competitor or to other products and services,” notified Singh.

This is also the time to start thinking about processes to scale and Singh says now is the right time for you to start thinking about putting certain processes in place for the organization to scale effectively and efficiently. “Processes can be an impediment when you are early stage startup, but start to get important as you grow and scale. What you do now impacts your company and organization 12-24 months down, as you get larger,” he elaborated.

Open & Honest Dialogue Across Company

When it comes to growth, every company has a unique path to follow. Hyper-growth stage of business development can be a roller coaster ride with unforeseen challenges, complexity and ambiguity in every step. According to Amit Ramani, Founder & CEO of Awfis Space Solutions, a strong leader is required to anticipate and admit the short comings and keep an open and honest dialogue across the company. “For Start-ups it is imperative to have a robust business plan, a clearly outlined list of future endeavours that the organization wishes to achieve against measurable goals. Prioritization of tasks according to its importance and weighing its’ impact on the business also becomes key when on a growth trajectory,” he maintained.

The other essential thing is to focus on strategic hiring where the leader can rely on a strong network of people who will capture the company’s philosophy, remain focused on goals and will ensure all problems are solved on time. “In a hyper-growth state, it is important that CEOs communicate the organization’s vision and ongoing endeavours frequently to internal and external stakeholders to ensure transparency and building employee trust. When your company is expanding at an explosive rate, empower your team by setting directives for them to lead, build your brand and nurture your booming start-up,” enumerated Ramani.

Remain Open To Possibilities & Ideas

Michael Lyngdoh, co-founder, Tripoto, attributes Tripoto’s success to strong support from his employees and investors. “We had to focus the frenetic growth on what really mattered,” he says.

His first tip is to “Identify and focus on your priorities”. They used the Pareto principle to identify the 20% of activities that were bringing 80% of the value. These were marked as non-negotiables. The company would collectively work towards these focus areas and reduce money and time spent on the others.

Lesson number two from him is to hire emotionally adept and agile leaders. “A key reason for Tripoto thriving while many others failed is because our team is made of dedicated and strong employees that are able to transform the way they think and act quickly. We haven’t lost the startup mentality even as we’ve grown,” he says. “People still feel as free to walk up to me or my co-founder Anirudh with ideas as they did when we were a small crew,” enthused Lyngdoh.

This leads him to offer his final recommendation, “Don’t lose the best part of being a startup – the scrappiness! No matter what phase or pace of growth you are at, remain open to possibilities and ideas. Don’t confuse growth with structural rigidity. If you become a large corporate with silos, it will become hard to innovate, create or kill as quickly as you used to when you first started out! These are my key principles for successfully navigating hyper growth for startups.”

Finally, continue iterating, innovating, learning and moving fast. Never lose the sight of being impatient, innovating, learning every day and moving fast on execution. This is what separates success from failure and one of the main reasons why more established companies and brands get disrupted. Congrats again and good luck in your steering your company to bigger success!

View this article from the below link:

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/314810

The number of co-working spaces has increased considerably in India and abroad in the recent years. What apparently started as a trend has, with time, attracted many start-ups and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) for its cost-effective facility. Even big companies are slowly embracing this unique concept.  The entire concept of a usual workplace has undergone a complete transformation. Compared to traditional offices, the co-working spaces provide a comfortable working environment, besides taking care of other factors like flexibility and cost effectiveness.

In a conversation with the Entrepreneur India, Amit Ramani, Founder & CEO of Awfis, shared his view about the upcoming trend this year towards opting for co-working spaces. The facility is working wonders for start-ups, which are looking forward to scale up their business and are ready to share a co-working space.

Concept Of Workplace Will Change

“The notion of work itself will change and so will people’s way of perceiving work related to desk. Wearable tools and technology will ensure that you really don’t need to be connected to laptop physically. Instead, you could use your Google Glass to do your work in advance and be a little ahead of time. I can wear this tool of advanced technology and get my work done,” he said.

Workplace Design

“Earlier, I arranged for a desk and chair in tandem with the notion of work that tells you need a desktop. Now with the laptop you have the freedom to work for hours in a relaxed posture and also its wireless. Before 2000, it was all about the hierarchy. From 2000 to 2010 it was about the collaboration. So team work and collaboration came into play,” he highlighted.

Choice Will Become Important

Today, the employee is at the center of attention and a workplace should be designed the way employees want it to be, Ramani said. “This is precisely the reason why giant companies like Facebook and Google have a desk in their offices, but have also kept bean bags to laze around. The work will change to become employee-driven. So the employees’ comforts will define the workplace. The office atmosphere should be adaptable so that if I want to sit on a sofa and work, I should be able to do that,” he opined.

Create a Network of Spaces

The idea that the city requires three to four large co-working centers and 2,000 seats in three locations across the city will not work anymore, Ramani said. “A network of spaces has to be created. If my business is in the South- Ex area, I need to have a co-working centre in South –Ex. Multiple centers should be built across the city. The network effect will be important because people will not like to waste time commuting,” he added.

Co-working Category Will Have Few Big Players Left

“When we started two years ago, there were four co-working spaces, today there are 115 in the country. The fact is even if a landlord gives you free space, you have to pay for the lights and furniture. Ultimately, I feel that only a few big boys will not come under this category as it happens in every case. Business centers will slowly merge with the co-working spaces. It’s not that companies will stop making headquarters. If I have to build headquarters in Gurgaon for 3,000 people it will come up, but in future companies will stop setting small offices, in addition to large headquarters,” he added.

(This Awfis coverage appeared on Entrepreneur India on April 12, 2017. You can read the original story here.)

Sudden spurt in the number of start-ups has resulted into massive number of entrepreneurs travelling to different geographies across the country with dire need for meeting places offering utmost convenience of creative seating arrangements, seamless internet connection and refreshment facility nearby airports.

The challenge that more start-ups face is that in early days they don’t have much money to spend on infrastructure. They want to spend money on technology or hiring best talent but the infrastructure is where nobody wants to spend money. Thus co-working spaces, provisioned out of commercial places and plush hotels, are emerging out to be the most preferred destinations for the growing number of start-up and SME entrepreneurs over the conventional choice of cafés, which are also continuing to be the long preferred destinations ideating and encouraging business ideas.

Capitalizing on the opportunity, Amit Ramani who launched his start-up Awfis in 2015 is in creating widest number of co-working seats across the country.

“Our goal is to have 200,000 seats in the next 24 to 36months. The clear goal is we should have Awfis location within 10 minute radius of airports in 7 to 10 large cities across India. With co-working office space one can truly give up his office and be able to use any co-working space nearby airport. Today my work really gets done at the convenient location. I could in one place in this moment and the other place in next hour and if my fix office is somewhere far then I am stuck between the fact that I have to go back to the office and work”, said Amit Ramani, Founder & CEO, Awfis.

Emergence of idea

“I was in US for 12 years, did my masters there and one of my teachers in Cornell University were essentially advising people on researching on how people become most productive in their physical space, what kind of spaces work for people, at what age bracket, what gender types. Essentially it was studying peoples work and behavior pattern and that’s what we use to do in 2001. Started from there we use to advise large corporate on how work really gets done, how do you create infrastructure that reduces your real estate footprint but still makes your employees the most productive. That is the background of this idea”, said determined Co-founder.

Servicing Smile community

Awfis has created a platform that allows one to book a seat or a meeting room, open seat or closed seat cabin on truly adjacent time basis. It offers around 1500 seats across seven centers in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. It provides space for an hour to 11 months, from one seat to multiple numbers of seats across various locations, starting from Rs 300 per to Rs 13,000 accordingly.

It has started servicing to SME’s, start-ups and freelancers among others from small, medium, individual local entrepreneurs (SMILE) community. For entrepreneurs the start-ups has established multiple partnerships for services ranging from financial to insurance to healthcare to food to stationary to dryclean. It’s 25 plus partners include Yes Bank Fasoos, Kaya Clinic, Apollo Munich Dental, Lemon Tree, Trident and Beer Café among others. Hence it’s planning to increase the number of partners to 200 plus in six months.

“Anything that a start-up or any SME requires from a service perspective is available in our centre and our community manager’s soul aim in life is to take care of needs for our start-up or SME community”, said Amit Ramani.

Partnership Funding

Started with the $3 million bootstrap funding support of its partners the start-up has secured funding upto about $10 mn between its partners.

At operating level its centers have 45 percent occupancy rate and these centers breakeven probably in six month on operating level. Its centers older than 90 days are 100 percent full. Currently it has earned around 500 plus clients.

Our goal is to be the number one player in India and in the world in the next three to five years.  With that goal and ambition clearly we would walk to raise the fund in the market. In the next tranche we are looking to raise $30 to $50 mn from VCs in six to nine months.

Not a tough road

Fortunately co-working industry is not much regulated space like telecom or banking. There are regulations of by-laws signages, shops and establishment, food and beverages and these laws are not difficult to comply with for the newly venturing entrepreneurs. But finding the right commercial place or hotels at right location is certainly a challenge.

Future plans

Awfis is aiming to have around 8 plus centers in the next six months and by the end of March 2016 it would have around 4000 seats across Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. By the end of December this year it is targeting to have about 10,000 seats across Pune, Hyederabad, Ahmedabad and Chennai in addition to Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore.

Though still at nascent stage co-working space industry has a promising future ahead with the flourishing entrepreneurship in the country demanding for the convenient mobile working places nearby airports, hotels and commercial meeting places.