Why is SME growth so hard?
- Written by Veijo Komulainen
Statistics tell us that way too many small firms never make their way into the mid-sized tier. Consequently, most firms are small. Just over five percent of companies based in the EU exceed one million euros in annual revenue. Startups are not much different in their growth prospects. Only 5–7% of all startups globally grow significantly, and only about one in a hundred startups manages to sustain rapid growth.
What are the underlying reasons for the slow growth? According to Harvard Business Review, 85% of CEOs in large corporations consider their companies’ internal factors as the most significant obstacles to growth. This also applies to SMEs.
Apart from market-based challenges, growth is often stopped – or at least slowed down – by companies’ internal factors. It is typically stymied in situations, where the operational pattern and organization should be altered, but when the need for change is ignored or simply not recognized. This is a phenomenon, which all small businesses growing beyond 20 employees will face, but only less than one out of five will initially recognize, halting the growth.
My book, Growth and Scaleup Enablers for SMEs, explains and creates understanding of the necessary organizational and leadership developments that all growing small companies need to undertake to enable growth, and speed it up. It opens up a path for traditional organizations to make their operations agile, lean and self-imposed, leading to higher productivity and job satisfaction.
I wrote the book for the CEO of a growing company. I also focused on the needs of legal, financial, HR, communication and ICT professionals who work for growing companies, making it a practical handbook for SME growth. One of the book reviewers says:
”Scale-up is the most challenging of entrepreneurial ventures. Veijo’s book tackles this
challenge. He provides the idea of how things should be but also the realities of scaleup
based not just on studies, but on his real and extensive experience. I highly recommend
this book to anyone interested in the world of entrepreneurship and especially to those
managing companies in transition.”
- Gene Detroyer, Professor International business, Guizhou University of Finance and Economics Professor, Leadership & Entrepreneurship, European School of Economics, 2008–2018
The book is available at Amazon, iBooks, eBay.
You can find me and blogs about the book at LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/veijokomulainen/
Twitter: @KomulainenV