If “blitzscaling” only meant growing rapidly and sustainably, it would be just another word for impressive business success. Every company seeks to grow, and every successful company grows. It’s what happened when Amazon went from having 151 employees and $5.1 million in revenue in 1996 to having 7,600 employees and $1.64 billion in revenue in 1999 – a 50-fold increase in employees and a 322-fold increase in revenue, all in just three years!īut there’s a caveat we need to add to our definition. Put those ideas together, and you have a first approximation of what “blitzscaling” means: it’s business growth that’s not only very rapid, but also proportional, and therefore sustainable. If you manage to avoid this problem and your lemonade empire spreads to every block of the city, you’ve achieved “scaling” in the second sense of the term: your company is operating on a massive scale! After all, if you run out of cups, it won’t matter how many lemons you can squeeze!
If you try to expand in just one of these areas, the expansion won’t be sustainable. To sell more lemonade, you need to invest in additional booths, lemons, cups and workers.
That’s important, because to sell more products or services, a company needs to expand its infrastructure, resources and labor force, and they have to keep pace with each other for the growth to be sustainable.įor instance, imagine you’re a kid with a lemonade stand, and you want to expand your empire. First, it means growing a company in a way that keeps all of its parts proportional to each other as it develops.
“Scaling,” in turn, is shorthand for “scaling up.” In business, that means two things. For example, if a company suddenly floods the airwaves with a full-throttle advertising campaign, it would be a “marketing blitz.” In modern English, it’s become an informal way to describe what happens when an organization tries to achieve something at lightning speed. “Blitzscaling” is a recently invented word, so if you’re not sure what it means, you’re in good company! The easiest way to define “blitzscaling” is to break it down into its components: “blitz” and “scaling.”
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