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Growth and scale are often used interchangeably, but they describe two different stages of business development.
A company in growth stage is usually focused on proving demand, increasing revenue, winning customers and working out which parts of the business model are worth investing in. A company entering scale up stage faces a different challenge. It already has evidence that something works. The question is whether that success can be repeated without costs, complexity and founder involvement rising at the same rate.
That distinction matters because the skills, systems and people that help a company grow are not always the same ones it needs to scale.
The OECD describes high growth enterprises as firms with at least 10 employees that grow by an average of at least 10% a year in employment or turnover over three years. However, research also suggests that scaling is not simply the moment when the growth numbers become visible. Companies that go on to scale often begin changing before the high growth period itself, including changes in productivity, access to finance and international activity.
In other words, scale is usually built before it appears in the numbers.
The growth stage is often a period of experimentation.
The company may have found a product or service that customers want, but there are still many questions to answer. Which customer segment is the strongest fit? Which sales channel works? What should the product include? What should the company stop doing? Which opportunities should it pursue?
This stage can feel energetic and chaotic at the same time.
Founders are often still closely involved in sales, customer relationships, product decisions, hiring and delivery. Many processes exist because one person knows what to do rather than because the organisation has built a clear and repeatable system.
That can work for a while.
It can even work very well.
A founder may win customers through personal relationships. A small team may respond quickly because everyone speaks to everyone. Problems can be solved through a message, a call or a quick decision.
But as the company grows, those informal ways of working can start to break down.
The founder becomes a bottleneck.
Important information sits in people's heads.
Customers receive different experiences depending on who supports them.
New employees take longer to understand how things work.
More activity creates more complexity.
This is the point where growth can start to become uncomfortable.
The discussion that inspired this article captured this well. One founder described growth as doing more, while scaling meant building something that could work without requiring more of the founder every single time. Another company had grown rapidly to nearly 600 schools, but had added people without building enough process underneath that growth. It later reduced both its customer base and team size and had to reconsider its product, systems and route to market.
That experience is not unusual.
Harvard Business Review has argued that companies can run into serious problems when they pursue growth faster than their internal capabilities can support. Investment in people, training, systems, technology and processes is often what allows a company to raise its sustainable rate of growth rather than simply adding more volume to an already stretched organisation.
A scale up still wants growth.
The difference is that growth now needs to become repeatable.
A company at this stage is asking different questions.
Can we acquire customers in a predictable way?
Can new people join without needing constant access to the founder?
Can we maintain quality as customer numbers increase?
Can our technology support significantly more users?
Do we understand our unit economics?
Can our managers make decisions without everything moving back up to the leadership team?
The focus shifts from proving that something can work to proving that it can work repeatedly.
This is why scale can sometimes feel less exciting than growth.
Growth often brings visible wins. A new customer signs. A partnership launches. Revenue increases. The team expands.
Scale involves work that is often less visible.
Processes.
Documentation.
Management structures.
Technology.
Financial planning.
Data.
Clear responsibilities.
Hiring specialists.
Stopping activities that no longer make sense.
Yet this less visible work is often what allows future growth to happen.
McKinsey describes the transition from founder led growth to scale as a change in both leadership and organisational design. As companies grow, founders often need to move from being involved in most decisions to building an organisation that can make good decisions without their constant involvement.
One of the hardest parts of scaling is that success can reveal problems rather than solve them.
A business may have grown quickly using systems that were never designed for its current size.
The CRM may no longer provide the information the team needs.
Customer onboarding may depend on manual work.
Several versions of the product may need to be maintained.
The founder may still approve decisions that should now sit with managers.
Teams may have been hired quickly without clear ownership between roles.
Technology decisions made when the company had 20 customers can become expensive problems when it has 2,000.
This is sometimes described as technical debt, but the same principle can apply across the entire organisation.
There can be operational debt.
Management debt.
Hiring debt.
Process debt.
The company postponed building something properly because speed was more important at the time. That may have been the right decision. The problem comes when the temporary solution quietly becomes permanent.
One speaker in the discussion warned that supporting several generations of technology can eventually become an inhibitor to scale. Another reflected on the need to bring in people with skills that the founding team simply did not have.
The scale up stage therefore requires a level of honesty.
What worked because the company was small?
What genuinely works because the business model is strong?
Those are not always the same thing.
Hiring during the early growth stage is often heavily focused on flexibility.
Companies need people who are comfortable with ambiguity and willing to operate outside a narrow job description. A role may change significantly within six months because the business itself is still changing.
As the company moves towards scale, the hiring challenge becomes more complex.
The organisation still needs adaptable people, but it also needs deeper expertise.
A founder may need to hire a sales leader who can build a sales function rather than simply sell.
A strong individual contributor may need to be replaced or supported by someone who can manage a team.
The company may need specialists in RevOps, customer success, finance, people, product or engineering.
This can be a difficult shift for founders.
The people who helped build the early company may not always be the same people needed for the next stage. Equally, hiring senior people from large organisations does not automatically solve the problem. Someone who has worked successfully within a mature company may struggle in a scale up where systems are still being built.
The hiring question becomes less about whether someone has done the job before and more about the environment in which they have done it.
Did they inherit a working system?
Or did they help build one?
That difference matters.
It is easy to assume that a growing company becomes financially more comfortable.
That is not always the case.
Growth can require significant investment before the financial return arrives.
The company may need to hire ahead of revenue.
It may need to invest in new technology.
Sales cycles may lengthen.
Product development may increase costs.
A company selling into education may also face long procurement cycles, restricted budgets and buying decisions involving several stakeholders.
The transcript included several examples of this tension. Founders spoke openly about runway, funding and the difficulty of stepping away from consultancy or contract work that generated immediate income so they could spend more time developing a scalable product.
This is one of the defining tensions of the scale up stage.
The company needs to invest in the future while continuing to fund the present.
That is why high revenue growth alone does not necessarily mean the company is becoming stronger.
The quality of growth matters.
Scaling does not always mean hiring hundreds of employees.
For many companies, particularly within EdTech, partnerships can be one of the strongest routes to scale.
Selling individually to hundreds of schools requires a very different commercial model from building relationships with multi academy trusts, universities, distributors, governments or sector organisations.
A strong partnership can provide access to customers, credibility or distribution that would be expensive to build alone.
This was another important theme in the discussion. One founder described moving away from thinking purely about becoming bigger and towards thinking about how partnerships could multiply impact and reach.
That is an important distinction.
Scale does not have to mean more employees.
It can mean better distribution.
Better technology.
Stronger partnerships.
More efficient customer acquisition.
A clearer product.
Or a business model that becomes more effective as it grows.
The growth stage rewards movement.
The scale up stage rewards focus.
A growing business can often benefit from testing several things.
A scaling business usually needs to become much clearer about what it will repeat.
This is where companies often need to stop asking:
How can we do more?
And start asking:
What should we become exceptionally good at?
The OECD's more recent work on scaling SMEs shows why this matters economically. Across 17 countries with available data, employment scalers represented only 8% to 14% of SMEs in 2020, yet they accounted for 41% to 62% of the new jobs created by growing SMEs. Turnover scalers generated 53% to 73% of the additional turnover created by SMEs.
Scaling companies can therefore have a disproportionate impact.
But reaching that stage is not simply a matter of pushing harder.
It usually requires the company to change how it operates.
A growth stage company is still learning what works.
A scale up is building the structure to repeat what works.
A growth stage company may depend heavily on the founder.
A scale up needs decision making to spread across the organisation.
A growth stage company often wins through speed and flexibility.
A scale up needs consistency as well as speed.
A growth stage company may add people to increase capacity.
A scale up needs to ask whether better systems, technology, management or partnerships could increase capacity more effectively.
Neither stage is better.
The danger comes when a company is experiencing the demands of one stage while still operating as though it is in another.
A business can grow without being ready to scale.
It can hire without becoming more effective.
It can add customers without becoming more sustainable.
And it can become busier without becoming stronger.
Perhaps the clearest question for a leadership team is therefore not simply:
How fast are we growing?
It is:
What are we building now that will allow this company to keep working when it is twice the size?
That is where growth starts to become scale.
Yes. I’d make these sections more narrative, with fewer short lines and more explanation. I’d also use the external data to support the argument rather than making the article feel overloaded with statistics.
Here’s a fuller version:
Scaling an EdTech company can take longer than scaling a business in many other parts of technology because education is not a simple market.
The person using the product is often not the person buying it. A teacher may use the platform every day, but the purchasing decision may sit with a headteacher, a multi academy trust, a university, a procurement team or another senior stakeholder. The organisation therefore has to demonstrate value to several different people, often with different priorities.
The user may care about ease of use and whether the product improves the learning experience. A school leader may want evidence of impact. A finance team may focus on cost. A procurement team may need to consider compliance and value for money.
That complexity affects the sales process and, as a result, the pace of growth.
For companies selling into schools and trusts in England, procurement itself can add another layer to the buying process. The Department for Education provides specific procurement guidance and approved buying routes for schools and trusts, which reflects the more structured environment suppliers have to navigate. (GOV.UK)
There is also the issue of timing. Education operates around academic years, budget cycles and implementation windows. A conversation that starts at the wrong point in the school year may not become a contract for several months. A successful pilot may still need further approval before it becomes a wider rollout.
For a founder, this can make the journey feel slower than expected. There may be strong interest in the product, positive feedback and an active pipeline, but the revenue takes longer to follow.
This is particularly important when companies compare themselves with businesses in other areas of SaaS. A shorter sales cycle may allow another technology company to test its commercial model quickly. An EdTech company may need much more time to understand whether the same model is truly repeatable.
The market environment has also changed significantly since the investment boom of 2020 and 2021. HolonIQ reported that global EdTech venture capital investment fell to approximately $2.4 billion in 2024, the lowest level in a decade and around 89% below the 2021 peak. By the first quarter of 2026, funding remained selective, with $512 million invested across 63 deals. (holoniq.com)
That does not mean EdTech companies cannot grow. It means that many are being asked to grow differently.
There is more pressure to prove outcomes, demonstrate sustainable revenue and make careful decisions about where to invest. HolonIQ has also noted a broader return to fundamentals across the education market, with greater focus on learner outcomes, engagement and retention. (holoniq.com)
As a result, the route from startup to scale up may be less about growing as quickly as possible and more about finding a model that can survive longer sales cycles, changing funding conditions and increasingly demanding customers.
This is also why growth timelines can be misleading.
A company may spend several years learning how to sell successfully into one education segment before it is ready to expand. Moving from individual schools to multi academy trusts is not simply a case of selling larger contracts. The buying process, stakeholder map and value proposition may all change.
International expansion creates another layer of complexity.
Europe is not one education market. Each country has its own structures, funding models, curriculum priorities, regulations and routes to market. HolonIQ's analysis of the European EdTech ecosystem has shown growing geographic diversity, with countries outside the largest traditional markets becoming more prominent. The Netherlands, for example, increased its representation in the 2024 Europe EdTech 200. (holoniq.com)
For an EdTech company, entering a new country may therefore require more than translating the website and hiring a salesperson.
The company may need local market knowledge.
It may need different partnerships.
It may need to adapt its messaging.
It may need people who understand how decisions are made within that education system.
All of this takes time.
A slower route to scale does not necessarily mean the business is failing. The more important question is whether the company is becoming more repeatable, more sustainable and less dependent on individual people or one off opportunities.
That distinction also appears in wider research on scaling companies. The OECD defines scalers as firms with at least 10 employees that increase employment or turnover by an average of at least 10% a year over three consecutive years. Across OECD countries, only around 10% to 15% of SMEs scale, yet this relatively small group contributes around half of new jobs created by SMEs. (OECD)
Scaling is therefore relatively rare.
Sustaining it is harder still. OECD research found that only 15% to 31% of companies that complete one period of scaling continue growing at 10% or more per year during a second three year period. It also found that around one in ten scalers later fall below their original employment or turnover levels, while around one in ten exit the market entirely. (OECD)
Growth is not a straight line.
For EdTech companies, where buying cycles can be longer and market structures more complex, that is particularly important to recognise.
The hiring needs of a growing company are not the same as the hiring needs of a company that is trying to scale.
During the growth stage, the business is often still testing its model. Roles can be broad because the company itself is changing quickly. A commercial hire may be responsible for prospecting, closing deals, creating partnerships, improving messaging and feeding customer insight back into the product.
Job descriptions can change within months.
Processes may still be informal.
The person joining may have to create their own way of working because there is no established playbook.
At this stage, adaptability is often one of the most valuable qualities a company can hire for.
The organisation may need people who are comfortable working without perfect information and who do not expect every system to already exist.
However, the recruitment challenge changes when the company starts moving towards scale.
The company is no longer simply asking whether it can win customers.
It is asking whether it can win them predictably.
It is no longer asking whether one strong salesperson can succeed.
It is asking whether a sales team can repeat that success.
It is no longer enough for the founder to know what works.
That knowledge has to become part of the organisation.
McKinsey describes a natural ceiling that many growing companies reach when the approach responsible for their early success is no longer enough to support the next stage of growth. The company has to move away from relying heavily on founder led activity and build stronger leadership, systems and organisational structure. (McKinsey & Company)
Recruitment becomes central to that transition.
A growing company may hire a salesperson because it needs more revenue.
A scaling company may need to hire someone who can build the sales function itself.
Those are not the same requirement.
A successful individual contributor may be excellent at selling but may never have designed a sales process, introduced forecasting, built a team or created a repeatable approach to territory management.
Similarly, a strong customer success professional may be excellent at managing relationships but may not have experience building an onboarding model that works across hundreds of customers.
The scale up stage often requires people who can create structure around success.
This is one reason recruitment becomes more strategic as the company grows.
The wrong hire does not simply affect one role.
A senior leader can shape a whole function.
They influence who gets hired next, which systems are introduced, how performance is measured and how decisions are made.
At growth stage, a hiring mistake can slow the company down.
At scale up stage, it can create problems that spread across teams and take much longer to repair.
McKinsey's research on hypergrowth companies places particular emphasis on people and leadership, arguing that scaling organisations need to strengthen talent systems while preserving the qualities that helped them succeed in the first place. (McKinsey & Company)
The challenge is therefore not simply to hire more people.
It is to hire people who match the problems the company is about to face.
One of the most valuable things a growing company can hire for is relevant stage experience.
This does not mean simply hiring someone from a well known company.
It also does not mean that everyone joining a scale up must previously have worked at another scale up.
The important question is what that person has actually experienced.
There is a significant difference between someone who has worked inside a successful company and someone who helped build the systems that made the company successful.
A senior sales leader may have managed a large team, but did they inherit that team or build it?
Did they join after the sales process had already been established, or did they help create it?
Did they have a recognised brand generating inbound demand, or did they have to build trust in a market that did not yet know the company?
Did they work with a large RevOps function, marketing team and established CRM, or did they have to create the infrastructure themselves?
These questions are often more useful than the job title.
The same principle applies across the organisation.
Someone may have been a senior leader in a company with thousands of employees, but that does not automatically mean they will thrive in a business of 40 people.
They may be used to resources, budgets and specialist support that do not exist in a scale up.
On the other hand, someone who has only worked in very early stage startups may be highly adaptable but may never have experienced what happens when the company grows beyond informal ways of working.
The most relevant experience often sits somewhere between the two.
The company needs people who understand what changes as a business grows.
They have seen communication become harder as the team expands.
They know that processes which felt unnecessary at 20 employees can become essential at 100.
They have experienced the shift from founder led decisions to distributed leadership.
They understand that adding more people does not automatically create more capacity.
This is particularly important in EdTech.
Someone can be an excellent commercial leader and still take a long time to understand the education market.
The sales cycle can be unfamiliar.
The buying process can involve several stakeholders.
The user may not control the budget.
Implementation may need to fit around the academic calendar.
Success may depend on relationships with trusts, universities, governments or other sector partners.
Someone who already understands those dynamics can often reach effectiveness faster because they are not learning the market from the beginning.
This is where sector experience can have real commercial value.
It is not simply about having a network.
A contact book on its own does not create sustainable growth.
However, an existing understanding of the market can help someone identify the right opportunities, avoid weak ones and communicate with buyers in a way that reflects how the sector actually works.
The same applies to international growth.
A company expanding into the Netherlands, Germany or another European market may benefit from hiring people who already understand the local education system, buyer expectations and commercial environment.
That knowledge can reduce some of the trial and error involved in entering a new market.
Again, this does not mean only hiring people who have done exactly the same job before.
Companies still need diverse thinking.
Hiring only from the same group of businesses can create its own limitations.
The stronger approach is to understand which experience is genuinely relevant to the company's next stage and which skills can be learned.
One of the most common mistakes growing companies make is hiring only for the problem they have today.
The company is short of sales capacity, so it hires another salesperson.
Customer support is stretched, so it hires another customer success manager.
The founder is overwhelmed, so the company hires a senior leader.
Sometimes that is exactly the right decision.
But scaling requires a longer view.
The leadership team also needs to ask what the role will need to become over the next 12 to 24 months.
A salesperson joining a team of three may soon be part of a team of 15.
A Head of Sales may need to become a VP.
A customer success leader may move from managing relationships personally to designing systems for an entire team.
The role changes because the company changes.
Hiring someone who is perfect for the current version of the role but unable or unwilling to grow with it can create another hiring problem relatively quickly.
At the same time, companies can hire too far ahead.
Bringing in a senior executive from a much larger organisation before the company has the complexity to justify that role can be expensive and frustrating for both sides.
The person may expect resources that are not available.
The company may expect the senior title itself to solve problems.
This is why stage matching matters.
A company should understand not only where the candidate has worked, but what the organisation looked like when they joined, what changed while they were there and what they personally helped build.
For a scaling company, experience of the journey can often matter more than experience of the destination.
The discussion that inspired this article returned repeatedly to the same challenge.
Companies grow, then realise that the next stage requires different processes, different technology, different partnerships and sometimes different skills within the team. Founders who have been closely involved in every decision have to learn when to let go. Teams have to bring in people who know more than they do in specific areas.
That can be uncomfortable.
But it is also part of building a business that can exist beyond the founder.
The growth stage often rewards people who can create momentum.
The scale up stage needs people who can turn that momentum into something repeatable.
The best hiring strategy therefore starts with understanding the stage of the business.
What is still being tested?
What has already been proven?
What is currently dependent on one person?
What needs to become a system?
What will break if the company doubles in size?
The answers to those questions should shape who the company hires next.
Because scale is not simply about adding people.
It is about adding the experience, skills and leadership that allow the business to grow without becoming harder to run every time it gets bigger.
This is the direction I’d use in the final blog. The strongest stats are the 10% to 15% of SMEs that scale creating around half of new SME jobs, the fact that only 15% to 31% sustain another three year scaling period, and the 89% fall in EdTech VC investment from the 2021 peak to 2024. Together, they support a strong argument: scaling is rare, sustaining it is harder, and EdTech companies are now doing it in a much more selective funding environment. (OECD)
