Impulsa Series on Second Stage Growth

At Impulsa Business Accelerator we help second stage companies grow to become the next generation of market leaders. We offer a Business Acceleration Program, built upon best practices in management consulting optimized for high-growth companies on their journey to accelerated and sustained growth. Second stage growth companies are a particularly interesting breed of firms. They are perhaps the most important companies of the economy, yet their contribution often go unrecognized and there is a huge gap in the servies catering to their needs. These firms are growth-oriented businesses that have survived the startup phase but have yet to reach maturity, and they are responsible for a disproportionally large part of job and wealth creation. In this interview series, we shed light on this category of firms. We often hear that small businesses are the engine of the economy, and if that is the case, then second-stage firms are the motor of that engine. Between 1993 and 2008, second-stage firms represented about 11% of all U.S. companies but accounted for 36% of jobs, close to 25% of positive job growth and 38% of sales [1]. Typically, second stage companies have between $1 and $50 million in revenues and 10-99 employees, but what separates them from other small and medium sized firms is their apetite for growth. They deliberately seek to scale their businesses to national or even global markets. The 'second stage growth cycle' is the transition period during which a company transforms from being a startup to become a mature organization. This is a particularly trying period in the company lifecycle that we at Impulsa Business Accelerator often call "company adolescence", as it brings to mind many of troubles and hurdles a teenager faces while moving into adulthood. As a company gets solid traction in the market and starts to receive steady streams of revenue it often gets sucked into the daily operations of running a business and the balance betw