‘Scaling’ is a term that is becoming more commonly used in today’s business lexicon.

The OECD (Organisation for Economic Development) defines a ‘scaling’ as average annualised growth of 20% over 3 consecutive years either in revenue or employee numbers, and which has 10 or more employees at the start of the observation period.

Staggeringly, less than 2% of SMEs (Small to Medium sized Enterprises) achieve this, globally.

In the UK alone, there are 5.7M SMEs generating £2Trn for the UK economy, 50% of which comes from ‘scale-ups’ of which there are only 34,000.

This is our purpose. We are moving the dial on this.

Growth is achieving more results through the same or more effort.  Scaling is achieving more results with less effort.Essentially Growing is doing more with more, Scaling is doing more with leverage (leveraging processes for example).

As a company moves from start-up to scale-up and starts to think about how they can take their product or service to a much greater audience, the focus must be less on experimentation and one-off wins and more on establishing the systems which enable long term, repeatable, sustainable growth.

Very few business leaders set aside time to think critically about the changes they need to make to scale, let alone master the formula of scaling.

ScaleX™ is the most holistic and comprehensive framework for scaling up an organisation. It is a framework designed by scaling leaders for scaling leaders and is based on 10 timeless principles of scaling.

It was developed by founders, Brendan McGurgan & Claire Colvin, who have been steeped in scaling businesses for their entire careers.

Brendan led the scaling of Northern Ireland based company CDE Global. When he joined in 2003, the company had 15 people and £3M revenue. Over a 12-year period he led the business to £100M revenue per annum with 700 people located in 6 continents. Brendan is now the host of the ScaleX™ Insider Podcast and he interviews global leaders and subject matter experts on each principle within ScaleX™. Claire is an experienced People Director who has spent her entire career attracting great talent into scaling SMEs, building their capability and creating the right environment for them to thrive. On the Board of CDE Global, she developed the people systems and structure to enable the company to scale globally and prior to that, she led the Talent function within a scaling technology business growing 30% year on year. Claire and Brendan now work with ambitious leaders around the world to guide and support them on their scaling journey.

In 2019 they carried out extensive research into high growth, long-standing and successfully scaled companies across various industries around the world and authored the Amazon Best Selling book, ‘Simple Scaling – 10 proven principles to 10x your business’ which was published in March 2022.

Together, they are driven to remove the mystery around scaling up a business so that all ambitious, well-meaning business leaders can achieve it too. They continue on their scaling journey with us as they scale their own business.

This is often misconstrued. Simple does not mean easy.  Scaling a business is not at all easy, but it must never be complicated. Simple scales, complex fails.

Simplicity can often require the most advanced thinking and it is this that has already been done for you.  The most important piece of advice that runs through the whole ScaleX™ programme is to keep it simple, keep it honest and keep it real.

Being able to share complex matters in a simple (but not oversimplified) way requires a level of maturity and clear understanding of a situation.

We want to lay the code out for everyone to see and understand.

This programme is not for leaders of start-ups.  You will have already have proven your product-market fit and will be experiencing growth, coupled with the challenges that come along with it.  Typically, you will have achieved revenues of £1M – £15M in revenue.

You will be driven to take your product or service to a much wider audience and recognise the need to transform into a scale up, putting the right systems in place to enable you to sustain and accelerate this growth.