Speaker 1: So as I have worked with companies at various stages of their life cycle, starting from startup companies to midsize companies to large enterprises, I observed an interesting phenomenon. The phenomenon I observed is that several aspects of strategy that are absolutely critical for you to grow a company at the early stages, if you keep persisting with those strategies, they will kill you as you try to scale the company. So the paradox here is that the very strategies that really work for you at the early stages really start to hurt you in the long run. So you almost have to reverse your strategic thinking as you want to scale the company. So let me share a couple of examples with you. Choice of customers and markets. So in choice of customers and market, when you start off, you have to be opportunistic. You have to probe different segments, different markets, different customer, different opportunities. And it's okay to be broad in your search. In fact, you want to do probes in many different directions. And so early on in a startup company's life in the growth stage, they tend to be opportunistic. The choice of customers and markets is somewhat haphazard. And it needs to be because you're doing exploration. However, if you persist in being opportunistic too long, you can spread yourself too thin. So you need to narrow your focus and become strategic. Then you need to say, wait a minute, I'm getting more traction from the financial services vertical. So maybe I should focus on them. Or maybe the consumer market versus the business market is more attractive. So then I need to start to winnow down my choices. So you flip the switch and become strategic. So that's an example of a paradox. Now, interestingly, the reverse is also true. If you start out being too strategic and bet too early on a very specific area, you may be wrong. So what the opportunistic approach gives you is the option value. And then the strategic approach allows you to focus. So that's one switch. Take another example. How you drive sales and how you generate demand. Early on, it is all about relationships. Let's say you're a business-to-business company in the growth stage. So early on, what you're going to do is the founders of the company, the key personnel in the company, they're going to go out and sell to the Rolodex. They're going to have... So it's really about people buy from you because they know you. People buy from you because they have a relationship with you. So that is critical, because you can't sell without having that sort of personal connection. But at certain points, when you want to scale the company, that doesn't scale. How many people can you have in your Rolodex? How many personal relationships can you have? That's when you need to invest in building a brand. What is a brand? A brand becomes a proxy for a personal relationship. Somebody who's never met you, somebody who's never, you know, knows you as a person, knows the company, knows the brand. So that when your salesperson does walk in the door, they say, oh, we've heard of you guys, because that's what the brand has done for you. So that's another strategic reversal. Moving from relationship as the repository of sort of how you drive sales to brands. And the brands become the proxy for the relationship. So those are some of the paradoxes in scaling. I talk about some others, like a shift from projects to products, productizing what you do, and a shift really from, you know, people to process, where smaller companies, they don't tend to have deep processes, because it's really one person in a department. But as you grow, you can't rely on individuals, and you can't rely on personalities. You really need to institutionalize the expertise. So you need to shift from people to process. So those are some of the paradoxes in scaling a company. And as a business leader, you need to understand when you need to start making that switch as you seek to scale.