Life-cycle Archives - BusinessSetFree.com

4 Stages of the Small Business Product Life Cycle

No product lasts forever. Do you know where your small business product is in its product life cycle? Are you introducing tomorrow’s product, today?

The ‘Product Life Cycle’ is a model that predicts the general trend that most successful products or services will follow during their lifetime.

Stage 1: Introduction

As a product is introduced there will usually be high costs in bringing it to market but low sales resulting in initial losses.

Stage 2: Growth

If the market decides it wants the product, sales increase; and unit costs […]

5 Keys to Small Business Growth

Understanding the barriers to small business growth is important. Often small businesses concentrate on the external factors affecting growth but fail to recognise the important internal factors.

To grow your small business over time you will need to:

Create: a product/service
Manage (or Direct): the business
Delegate: to employees
Co-ordinate: activities
Collaborate: flexibly across teams

Greiner’s organisational growth model (Larry Greiner, 1972) shown below consists of these 5 consecutive phases of business growth – Creativity, Direction (Management), Delegation, Co-ordination and Collaboration.

Within each phase of growth Greiner observed that there is a period of growth through evolution followed by a crisis and then a period of growth through revolution. To understand the model it is important […]