Recognizing where your company stands in its growth cycle is like reviewing a road map of your journey’s progression. In business, this journey is full of twists and turns. But anticipating challenges and opportunities can make the difference between becoming an industry leader and succumbing to competitive pressure.

Common challenges that emerging companies face include market penetration, changing technologies, and employee management difficulties. When you successfully conquer these obstacles, you can establish an organizational foundation that supports your long-term objectives and set up a legacy for your name and brand.

Read on to familiarize yourself with the stages of business growth, from inception to maturity, and learn to make informed decisions so your company thrives at every step of the journey.

The 5 stages of business growth

By understanding the business lifecycle, you can identify where you stand and act according to challenges and opportunities. Here are the five critical stages of growth and how to navigate them.

1. Existence

Also called the startup phase, this is where the founder or owner does the heavy lifting and runs most operations. With a lack of investors and sponsors, owners also self-fund the business, rarely formally planning profits or expecting significant returns. For every venture in this phase, entrepreneurs grapple with finding a niche and brand identity, developing products and services, and securing initial customers.

Say a tech startup releases an innovative social media app. In the existence stage, the company focuses on proof of concept and gains user traction through marketing and beta testing. The startup also refines their offerings based on early responses and feedback to meet a newly acquired target audience’s evolving needs.

As you navigate this stage, prioritize adaptability, conduct thorough market research, and plan a sustainable business growth strategy that ensures a steady cash flow. Even if your company generates revenue, the likelihood of profits is low in its nascent stage.

To sustain existence, you must find investors and other funding sources while growing a small business from the ground up. Here are a few more tips to navigate this stage:

• Market validation. Thoroughly research the market to validate your product or service. You might use minimum viable products (MVPs) to test concepts before developing them and refine your offerings based on customer feedback.
• Lean methodologies. Adopt lean principles and agile development to minimize waste and focus on creating MVPs. Engage with potential customers through surveys, interviews, and A/B testing, and pivot if necessary before progressing to the next stage.

2. Survival

The survival stage marks a crucial juncture where the company transitions from existence to stability. At this point, they have a viable brand and are well-positioned to successfully deliver products and services to a dedicated customer base. Plus, the company now has a few employees, with the founder overseeing significant structural changes and decisions.

Following a breakthrough into the industry, the company’s focus shifts toward long-term survival, where the business must establish consistent and reliable revenue streams. These are still early company growth stages, so it’s unlikely you’ll make profits. Still, a realistic objective is to break even and earn enough to cover operational expenses and replace outdated assets like technology and resources. Without breaking even, the business risks running out of capital, which could force you to sell the company or its assets.

To maintain survival, you must create a robust business model that prioritizes cost-effective strategies, streamlines daily workflows, and diversifies revenue streams:

• Cost-effective strategies. Identify areas where you can maximize output with the fewest possible resources. You can also leverage artificial intelligence (AI) for tasks like marketing and personalization, allowing employees to focus on growth.
• Streamlined workflows. Consider developing a scalable enterprise web application tailored to your company’s specific needs. An in-house web app offers a centralized location for project management, communication, and collaboration that allows you to monitor and execute tasks in one place.
• Diversified revenue streams. Explore additional income streams, like partnerships and complementary products and services, to reduce dependency on one revenue source. For example, a software-as-a-service business can expand into related applications or services.

3. Success

This is when the company starts to thrive and solidify their presence in the market with steady profits and growing customer acquisition. Now an established company, the organization has the reputation and assets to ensure a healthy financial future.

If the business progresses to this point, it has the resources to hire more employees and a few managers to acquire projects and assume some of the owner’s decision-making. You’ll also find an expanded structure, with accounting departments, real-time marketing strategies, and multiple teams working together.

Now, the emphasis is on retaining customers, training teams, and investing in scalable technologies:

• Customer retention. Satisfied customers lead to repeat business and a positive reputation through word-of-mouth marketing. Implement loyalty programs, offer discounts, and address issues promptly to keep existing customers happy and appeal to potential target audiences.
• Training employees. With more employees and expanding departments, there’s a risk of organizational silos forming and impeding progress. To avoid this, proactively encourage a culture of open communication and knowledge-sharing to enhance teamwork and innovation. Host regular workshops to develop skill sets and be transparent about the company’s current opportunities and challenges to help employees grow with the business.
• Technology investments. These investments include connecting automation software, data visualization tools, and real-time analytics platforms to your digital channels. With the right solutions, you can effectively gather insights and make data-driven decisions to improve your content.

This stage often introduces several challenges, like quality sacrifices that cause customer dissatisfaction. But once you achieve stability, with risk-mitigation procedures and the know-how to weather turbulent times, you can continue cruising steadily.

4. Takeoff

In the takeoff stage, companies experience exponential growth, often propelled by innovative strategies, market trends, or breakthrough products. These situations allow you to leverage explosive expansion, but you must manage the increased demand and maintain an organizational culture amid scaling.

Also consider building your company’s network, perhaps by merging with another organization or acquiring a smaller business to expand your brand’s umbrella. Or you could develop new products and services or move into new markets.

For example, a streaming company introduces an appealing subscription-based model that achieves meteoric growth, resulting in the business receiving global recognition and becoming a dominant player in the entertainment industry.

Regardless of the industry, here are a few best practices to capitalize on in the takeoff stage:

• Build scalable infrastructure. Leverage your success and increased demand by scaling operations and entering new markets. And after developing an enterprise website, consider exploring cloud solutions to accommodate employees globally.
• Engage in strategic partnerships. Identify potential partners through industry events, networking, and market research. Forming strategic partnerships is an optimal way to expand reach and penetrate new markets. Ensure you collaborate with companies, sponsors, and investors whose ideas align with your business’s long-term goals.

5. Resource maturity

Finally, you have an established target market, loyal customers, and organizational structures that run like clockwork. As you approach the maturity stage, your primary goal is to optimize resources — like revenue, human capital, and partnerships — for long-term sustainability.

Whether snowballing into success or plateauing into stability, you must continue adopting new technologies and practices to thrive through industry fluctuations. Saturated and new markets both bring stiff competition, but planning while refining existing procedures can help you maintain a competitive edge and keep your business scaling.

Here are three ways to prepare to keep evolving maturely and sustain long-term success:

• Build a positive working environment. Foster a culture of innovation to stay competitive and keep employees motivated. Encourage them to contribute ideas, invest in new and existing talent, and stay ahead of industry trends. For example, you might invite industry experts to conduct seminars and educate your workforce. With the right support, teams maintain high productivity levels for continued growth and expansion.
• Diversify. Diversify product, service, and content offerings to adapt to your target audience’s changing needs and market dynamics. Regular industry analyses show new market opportunities, allowing you to exploit gaps and trends to solve pain points before competitors.
• Focus on the long-term vision. As success unfolds and stabilizes, review and refine your company’s long-term vision. Set ambitious yet realistic goals and achieve them by investing in employee development, sustainable practices, and social responsibility to cement your position as a market leader.

The best tools for your business growth strategy

New technologies come in many shapes and forms, but a website is an indispensable tool for your company’s growth trajectory — it’s the face of your brand and the touchpoint that makes or breaks a potential customer’s first impression.

With Webflow Enterprise, you can create an intuitive interface that shapes brand perception, engages visitors, and kickstarts your brand’s digital ecosystem. Whether scaling a small business or maturing as an enterprise, Webflow provides the versatility to adapt and thrive.

From the startup stage and beyond, tell your story with Webflow and grow your business today.