Comprehensive and global sample of growth
Our study consisted of nearly 200 companies. 18% of participating companies represented rapid growth, defined as between 20% – 40% compound annual growth rate (CAGR), while 33% of participating companies had experience with hypergrowth, defined as > 40 % CAGR. The remaining 49% of companies could be classified as normal growth, <20 % CAGR. This particular sample of global companies represents annual revenues from $100m – >$1bn (US) and includes a wide variety of industries, regions and organization sizes.
Global growth challenges
Over 55 % of all participating companies have experienced talent challenges. Talent is a global challenge, and is not differentiated by growth vs hypergrowth comparison. Other challenges, however, find different levels of priority based on regional issues. The top 5 growth challenges include regulation, technology, business models, talent, and funding & finance. While the start-up phase tends to attract a lot of attention and focus on entrepreneurship, our findings indicate that key growth challenges tend to take place in later growth phases and over 50 % of challenges are related to scaling requirements/processes and geographical expansion.
How Hypergrowth companies differ from other growth companies
Hypergrowth companies focused on different challenges and priorities. In order to isolate these differences we segmented the companies into growth and hypergrowth subgroups (rapid growth companies were not included). The results indicate the significant differences between the subgroups in terms of challenges and priorities. For example, in contrast to normal growth firms, scalability is the key priority for Hypergrowth companies and our findings indicate that agility is often a naturally embedded cultural priority for Hypergrowth companies, and thus receives less direct attention than one might anticipate.
Realistic expectations
Rapid growth and Hypergrowth companies make ambitious but realistic growth plans (11 – 50 % GAGR)
