Scale-up

A scale-up is a company with sustained strong growth. The common definition, which Statistics Netherlands (CBS) also uses, is at least 20 percent growth per year in headcount or revenue over a three-year period, with at least ten employees. Where a startup is mainly searching for a working model, a scale-up is scaling that model up.

According to the ScaleUp Dashboard by ECE and RSM, in collaboration with Statistics Netherlands (CBS), the Netherlands had roughly 2,805 high-growth companies in 2023. So it is a relatively small group of companies, one that does run into a recognizable series of growing pains.

Those growing pains are structural. Somewhere between 30 and 50 employees the informal way of running things breaks, because the number of lines of communication explodes: from 45 with ten people to 1,225 with fifty. At that point a scale-up needs structure that grows along with it without slowing the organization down.

Read more in From 10 to 50 employees without layers of management.