Developing and accelerating early-stage, growth-oriented technology ventures is difficult. Most ventures merely survive or fail, only a handful of them thrive. Corporate venturers are very familiar with this picture. But what defines successful new entrepreneurial firms? We review various research work addressing this question, analyse the relevance and impact of management control systems on the growth of early-stage technology ventures, exploring successful growth and internationalisation strategies.
A team of researchers led by Prof G Foster of Stanford University and T Davila of IESE Business School, having developed a number of research initiatives over the past decade, such as the Stanford Entrepreneurial Management Systems (Semas) project or the Stanford Executive Programme for Growing Companies, concluded that one important reason for ventures’ underperformance can be found in “entrepreneur’s resistance to switching to a more structured management approach and adopting management systems and processes in a timely way”.
The importance of the adoption of management systems and their role as a growth accelerator was introduced in a highly-influential article published in California Management Review. Management systems can be thought as “formal, information-based routines and procedures used by managers to maintain or alter patterns in organisational activities”. Management systems measure the gap between target and actual outcome within operating routines and in so doing influence the efficiency of organisational processes.
Organisations adopt such systems to gather and use information, which supports planning and controls, enabling decision-making. They include two important features – accountability and feedback, or learning. More precisely, the adoption of management systems can be associated with four outcomes – making goals explicit and stable, help with co-ordination and planning the sequence of steps, facilitating decision-making and resource allocation, and promoting accountability and facilitating control.
Entrepreneurial growth requires a significant change in how the venture is managed. The study unveils the relevance of management systems for growth. In particular, the findings support the association between growth and adoption of management systems. It is suggested that “start-ups often fail or do not achieve their full potential because they get stuck in this entrepreneurial crisis. The equation is simple: as you grow bigger, it is more efficient to use management tools. However, being simple does not mean that it is easy to do. Nor is it an activity that senior executives often relish”.
Whenever adopted adequately, management systems would reduce uncertainty, providing the necessary data to fill information gaps and for decision-making. The reduction of uncertainty facilitates co-ordination, resource allocation and performance measurement in a fast-moving environment.
But what exactly are the management systems adopted by early-stage, high-growth start-ups? The Semas project identified 46 different management systems, which can be clustered around eight distinct categories – financial planning, financial evaluation, human resource planning, human resources evaluation, strategic planning, product development, sales and marketing, and partnerships.
Interestingly, the study also shows that “the presence of venture capitalists is associated with faster adoption of management systems. Growth is an imperative for venture capital investors”. The authors found “in the first 40 months of a company’s existence, the venture-capital-backed companies grow on average twice as fast”. And that “venture-capital-backed companies not only adopt more management systems, but also adopt them earlier compared with non-venture-capital-backed companies”.
In addition, the rate of chief executive replacement correlates with the degree of implementation of management system adoption – 53% of founders of the lowest adoption group replaced in the first five years, versus only 31% of the chief executives with the highest adoption intensity of the systems.
Corporate venture teams and their co-investing venture capital peers are well advised to suggest and coach their portfolio companies to implement these management control systems from the first year onwards. It not only provides the investor and the entrepreneurs with a better cockpit dashboard, but also positions companies for faster-quality growth. In addition, entrepreneurs need to understandthat the chances of replacing the chief executive will be significantly reduced if they opt for an early adoption and constant use of the eight management control systems over time.
As derived from the 2011 venture capital movie Something Ventured, by Herb Boyer, the scientist who founded Genentech: “Start-ups are hard to build, easy to ruin.
Good venture capitalists [and corporate venturers] know how to facilitate the entrepreneurial process, and not create unnecessary distractions or burdens.”