scale-up also scaleup

a smaller business which wants to expand in terms of market access, income, number of employees, etc

Weathering the storms of the dotcom bubble and the global financial crisis, the word start-up has been a significant hallmark of the business lexicon since the turn of the millennium. In recent months however, it seems that this salient feature of the contemporary economic landscape is beginning to grow wings – start-ups are becoming scale-ups.

scale-ups are now thought to be key in creating long-term employment and economic growth

In early 2017, it was estimated that there were just over 10,000 scale-ups in the UK. These are small companies wanting to cross what's sometimes described as the 'growth chasm' – the gap between a fledgling company and one which is able to expand exponentially, both internally and through collaboration with larger, established companies interested in providing growth opportunities. A start-up is a new company whose challenge is to establish a repeatable and scalable business model. In other words, it's a business in the research phase. Having solved this challenge, a scale-up is correspondingly in the execution phase, wanting to flourish and expand workforce, operating base, market share and revenue. Scale-ups are not necessarily very young, tech-related companies, they can be any age or domain. According to the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), a scale-up is any company that 'is growing its sales or employee numbers by 20 per cent per annum over a three-year period, and which started that period of growth with at least ten employees.' Whilst start-ups provide new opportunities and foster entrepreneurship, scale-ups are now thought to be key in creating long-term employment and economic growth.

Another new term which has popped up in the business domain in recent months tackles a concept at the other end of the spectrum – not expansion, but reduction. The term sunsetting is now used in business contexts to refer to the process of deliberately phasing something out. It's usually used in reference to the gradual withdrawal of products, especially computer hard- and software, but can also apply to particular brands, or even partnerships or other business agreements. As well as a process noun it also occurs as a transitive verb, primarily in the passive form. Products and services are often sunsetted when they're no longer making profit, or if there's a change of focus for the business. The concept is of course particularly pertinent in the tech industries, where older products are usually sunsetted when newer versions become available. Metaphorical use of sunset takes inspiration from more established expressions such as sunset industry (an industry that is becoming weaker) and sunset clause/law/provision (a condition which states when a plan or agreement will automatically end).

Background – scale-up

The countable noun scale-up is of course derived from the phrasal verb scale up (= to make something larger in size or amount), on the model of start-up as a derivative of phrasal verb start up (= to bring a business or organization into existence). Start-up has been used in the business sense since the mid-seventies, though the first occurrence of it as a derived noun is very much older, dating right back to the 16th century.

As illustrated in the citation above, scale-up is, like start-up, often used as a modifying noun, so we frequently see expressions like scale-up business/company/phase/strategy. Somewhere at the intersection of start- and scale-ups is the more elusive unicorn, a start-up company whose value has reached more than one billion US dollars.