Like plants and animals, businesses aren’t always positioned to grow. The startup phase is the part of a company’s life cycle that is perhaps most interesting but is also most difficult in many ways. This is the time when you’re figuring out how to do what you do and how to get customers to respond to it. The organic growth that takes place during a company’s startup phase may come in fits and starts as you make rookie mistakes and also discover untapped potential.
Startup organic growth can come from refining your business model to make your company more profitable, developing products and services that showcase your strengths and attracting loyal customers who will sustain you into the future. Once your business operations stabilize, you may experience a period of growth in which organic expansion occurs smoothly and relatively effortlessly or as effortlessly as anything occurs when running a small business.
In this mature growth phase, you’re no longer doing the hard work of developing a foundation, and you have a solid core on which to build. You’ll need to keep investing in your infrastructure and your staff, but you’ll be able to do so with some knowledge and experience regarding what works. You may bring in investors to help with these financial outlays, but this growth is still organic because they’re supporting your core business model rather than looking for outside capacity to add.