"How are we going to scale this enterprise?" "What is our scaling strategy?" "What are the building blocks needed to take our concept to scale?"

If you have ever sat in on a board meeting of an organization, either for a for-profit or non-profit, I am sure you would have heard the above questions or some derivative of them.

Scale is a word that is often thrown around, but what is scale? In the business world, scaling an enterprise basically means optimizing resources to sells more goods or services in order to grow top-line revenues and finding ways to improve cost effectiveness to drive profitability. Simple, right? Or not. Not all businesses are created equal. Some business models are inherently more scalable than others. For example, an online retailer is much easier to scale than a brick-and-mortar store.

Defining scale in the for-profit world is relatively straightforward. And its importance is also clear: shareholder maximization. But what about in the BoP world, where measurement is not necessarily in dollars and cents and the goal is not wealth maximization? Can we simply take scaling strategies from the for-profit world and apply them to BoP ventures? I think most of us would say no. Therefore, it is important for us to look at scaling a BoP venture through a different lens.

In this post and the next, I'd like to open up the discussion on scaling a BoP enterprise. In this entry, I am going to attempt to bring some definition to the idea of scaling a BoP venture. In my next post, I will try to tackle the importance of scaling BoP ventures from a macro level.

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