Key Takeaways From ScaleOut: A Recipe for Social Enterprise Expansion into New Markets Webinar

On May 18th, the TRANSFORM Support Hub, powered by MovingWorlds, invited our friends at the Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship to share how social enterprises can assess their readiness for scale through expansion into new markets. 

You can watch the full recording of the session here, and find 8 key takeaways for social entrepreneurs below:

➕ Normal growth is arithmetic; you add a little bit at a time. Scaling is multiplicative, and it provides rapid growth. 

📈 Everything an enterprise does changes at scale, bringing new opportunities as well as new challenges. Entrepreneurs have to move between building and strategy, leadership development, and operations during scale-up. Leadership must shift from working in the business to working on it. 

🔨 Social enterprises can use one type of scale or incorporate a combination of all three. Each type of scale requires considering which parts of the business model or leadership need to change. 

❓ Social enterprises must ask two critical questions about business readiness and new market fit to scale. Taken together, the answers to those two questions lead to a recipe for what to change and what not to change. This allows organizations to execute and maintain their current operations successfully and move into new market areas. 

✋ If you can’t answer the nine ScaleOut Business Readiness Assessment questions positively, the business is unlikely to be ready to scale. 

🌎 Don’t get overwhelmed by the challenges of scale because the opportunities are enormous. In a world of change, we need to be multiplying good business models. 

📖 The ScaleOut Assessment helps enterprises develop a comprehensive and compelling story, ultimately creating buy-in from funders and partners. 

🎯 Stay the course when you don’t meet the criteria necessary for scale. Entrepreneurs have to get really good at prototyping and validating hypotheses and ideas. Test things out before you launch into scale!

Keep these tips in mind when assessing your enterprise’s readiness for scale, and for even more detailed guidance, complete the exercise at the end of the first workshop and join us for the follow-up webinar and live coaching session on June 22nd. For more guidance, apply to the TRANSFORM Support Hub.