How do you know when it is time for your startup to transition? This is not a rhetorical question, but there may be a need to ask a question before answering. What is the goal of your venture? This is a pivotal question in understanding what your transition strategy will become. Your transition strategy is very different if you are scaling to be aquired than if you are growing but plan to maintain a family run business.

Now that you are thinking about the focus of your venture we can move on to the original question about transitioning. You must have a pulse on your venture to know when transitioning makes sense. It is important to keep in mind the type of milestones that can be indicators of transition periods.

Potential Transition Milestones:

• Growing your team - You may need to rely on others to ensure your team is growing properly. This becomes important when your company has grown to the point that individual roles are now teams themselves. During the early days of your venture perhaps everyone met as one team frequently. Now teams have their own meetings and you may have less frequent company-wide meetings.

• Business Financing - Trying to land business financing may change the structure of your business. You may need to change from an LLC to a Corporation to get investors eyes. Perhaps you just need to focus on putting your existing profitable business plan down on paper to help secure a loan. There are many aspects a company must think through when the financial needs of the company change.

• Profitable Business Model - You may have an existing profitable business model, but there may still be things to consider. Is it growing your profits slower than expectations? Could you increase your profits by targeting an additional demographic or changing your pricing structure? Changing your business model is a company-wide effort and you will have to clearly communicate across your venture.

• Enter New Market - If you have been siloed in one industry for a period of time, you may have settled into your assumptions. When entering a new market, you should approach with the same research and action that you had when you initially launched. Maturing into your industry is a great thing; it shows a mastery of knowledge and execution. Remember that new markets and industries bring their own unique challenges to the table.

• Diversified Product/Service Offering - Should you pursue adding new products or services to your current offering? When you launched your venture initially you may have only had a single product or service offering. As a maturing company you will want to add to your product and/or service offerings. Doing this provides more stability to your venture. Having several products and services makes it less likely that a change in the marketplace will severely impact your profitability and viability as a company.

• Stay Private or Go Public - The status of your venture plays an important part of your business future. If you are focused on keeping your business within your family you are privately held company. If you decide to take your venture public your long term strategy is probably growing the company to make it a target for aquisition by a larger firm. This decision may be directly or indirectly tied to the type of business financing you need. If you are looking for large cash infusions you will probably want to take your company public and have it listed on the stock market. That is not a small undertaking. You will have to dedicate plenty of time and energy to preparing your company to go through the process leading up to an Initial Public Offering (IPO).

At some point you will switch your efforts from expanding your capabilities to streamlining and efficiency. This is an obvious point of transition as well. During earlier stages you were more focused on growing your presence and nailing down a profitable business model. Once you find your footing in the market you start to focus within the confines of your company.

Focusing internally is important. You need to ensure your infrastructure is in place. You also must give employees and teams attention they need to accomplish work. These are all great and needed measures. The real question becomes should you ever fully transition away from being a startup or thinking like one? No. You should always maintain startup thinking. Your thresholds for risk may change, but you should not try to eliminate risk. You should continuously try to replicate your the initial success of your startup. This means constantly trying new things, getting feedback on what works and then adapting.

The real transition may be more of a positional transition for yourself. As your company grows will you stay at the helm and let others pursue the startup cycle within the structure of your growing business? Will you decide to keep yourself hands on in day to day tasks and put the overall control into someone else's hands? It is possible to strike a balance of being in control and hands on, but you will have to determine your key priorities to stay focused.

We've looked at questions that need to have on going attention as you grow your startup. We've looked at potential points of transition. We've also examined how some choices directly or indirectly impact specific areas of your venture.

The most important point to remember is that your venture is unique and no one transitional approach works for every company.

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