I am a consultant at Select Medical, which specialises in manufacturing surfaces for pressure ulcer prevention for the healthcare sector. With an innovative range of products, we are focused on meeting the needs of care providers, carers and the cared for. A clearly defined strategy has seen Select Medical deliver 30 per cent growth in staff members and revenues this year.

Significant investment has been made in people and systems to ensure the organisation is well equipped to continue delivering its growth objectives. This year, Select Medical expanded its service and maintenance offer nationally by investing in a satellite hub in the Midlands.

Since our inception in 2001, we have been on an incredible journey making great progress and achieving key goals. We arrived at a point where we felt we had achieved most of our aspirational targets and it was the right time to reflect and set new goals to ensure we continued to strive for growth.

A lot of focus has been placed on developing an innovative range of products and building the appropriate infrastructure: teams, processes and systems as well as a clear strategy. With a firm foundation in place, we believe we are ready to scale up.

There’s often a mission, vision and values to help define purpose and shared principles that all members of the organisation can buy into. However, a leader must also have:

• Strategy: We spent time creating a one-page strategy for the next five years. This focused on how to use our competitive advantage to deliver rapid growth
• Style of leadership and cultural paradigm, this comes from the top
• Structure organised in the most effective manner
• Systems: processes and IT to ensure the job gets done right first time
• Staff and skills: right fit of team members and competencies
• Finance – to invest in the above

There is no such thing as failure as long as you learn from it. Often the fear of failure can hold people back from making a move. The right balance of passion, determination and planning can result in a successful formula for delivering rapid growth. There will inevitably be setbacks but having belief and keeping laser focused is important. The worst possible thing to do is do nothing!

1. Seek assistance – you do not have to take the journey alone. Be it peer to peer, a mentor or a growth or scale-up consultant like myself, these are rich sources that can help you scale up and achieve growth.
2. You are not a one-person team. You must have the building blocks in place be it people, systems. You can’t do it all by yourself.
3. DNA – do not compromise, dilute or lose your DNA. Your organisational culture is at the very heart of your success. Protect it as you scale up.