It's one thing setting up a business, but quite another to get it to grow. James Cleave, Chief Financial Officer at utilities firm the Everflow Group, outlines the three ingredients needed for a successful scale-up.
In 2015, Chief Executive Josh Gill created Everflow Water as an ethical water retailer. In 2019, Everflow Tech was launched, to share the technology that had led to Everflow Water’s success with the wider water market. In 2021, the Everflow Group ranked third in the FT1000, the Financial Times’ annual list of the fastest-growing businesses in Europe. Growth on this scale doesn’t happen by accident, and while ranking so high on such a prestigious list after just five years may have exceeded our wildest dreams, putting the right framework for growth in place from the start has been central to our success. Go big or go home If you’re just starting out but you know you have big plans, make sure your strategy is right from the very beginning – it’ll make the journey a lot smoother. Determining the right strategy is an iterative process as you work out which customers to serve, the best route to market and how to get your brand out there. Testing your strategy and product offering as much as possible with your potential customers, and reviewing their feedback as frequently as you review your financial information, can help you to respond quickly to whatever your customers are saying – and what they want. Without that feedback loop, you run the risk of investing in something that customers don’t value, but when you understand what your customers are after, you can double down on scaling the offering and make it more efficient and easier to access. Invest in people At Everflow, we hire first for values, then for skill. It’s always been Josh’s aim to create a workplace people want to come to, and part of that is employing the type of people others want to be around. More than this, the people you hire need to embody the business’s culture and values on a daily basis, so you don’t rely on your leaders to drive the culture, but everyone within the organisation. If you surround yourself with people who you trust and enjoy being around, you can’t go far wrong. Scaling a business also requires acknowledging very quickly that you don’t know everything, and that the best way to grow is to bring in specialists in each area who can tell you what needs to be done! You can have the most comprehensive strategy in the world, but if your team aren’t aligned to the vision, and you lack expertise in critical elements of the strategy, then you’ll be constrained in how far or how fast you can grow. You’ve got to have the right people to help you execute your plan. Speculate to accumulate The ultimate irony of scaling up is that it will suck out cash like nothing else in the very beginning. That’s why it’s vital that any business looking to grow has access to funds, so you need to make sure you’ve mapped out how the business plans to both fund its growth and generate cash. Monitoring cash is far more important in the early days than tracking profits – running out of cash is the one thing which will definitely stop your growth in its tracks! Passion project Underpinning all of the above is the need to have a passion for what you do, and a desire to build something to last. You’ll need this passion to get you through the hard times and help you reach your goals. Ours was simple; to make utilities simple and create an environment people enjoyed working in. Scalability, too, was built in, and the technology we have created has the potential to be shared across multiple industries. Up until now, the Everflow strategy has been very much about prioritising revenue growth, and the figures in the FT1000 speak for themselves – up from 363,266 euros in 2016 to 55,902,990 euros in 2019. We’re continuing to grow revenues year on year, but over the next few years our focus will also be on investing in tech to drive ever-increasing profits by automating as we scale further. The final word must go to Chief Executive Josh, whose vision those five short years ago has lead to the remarkable rise of Everflow. “It’s an incredible feeling to be ranked so high, but it’s a good endorsement and something to celebrate for the whole team, showing that all their hard work is paying off, and the results they’re achieving are truly remarkable. “However, that’s not to say our scaling journey is over, and we’re definitely aiming to make the list again; the bigger you get, the more difficult it is to maintain that pace of growth, but we want to keep growing as long as possible.”
