A strange phenomenon in the scale-up space is not knowing if you are a technology business or not.
I have seen this happen more times than I can count, but it’s really odd. Somethings happens to transmogrify a “normal” company into a technology company, and as that business scales, unless you know that you are a technology company, there’s lots that can go wrong in quite a spicy way.
The test if you don’t know if you are a technology business or not is to ask yourself the question: “is the main that you deliver value to your customers digital in nature?”
If the answer is yes – you are a technology business.
Normally this happens when non-technology founders with a bias for sales and marketing find a way of delivering value that, over time, gets more and more digital.
The issue is that over time, the digital nature of those products get progressively more unwieldy, and unless you make that mental transformation and pull the strategic work in behind it, you lose the ability to grow any bigger.