Start with the strongest foundation possible. In designing your next venture, be that from the very beginning or the end of the ideation stage, it is essential that you understand your future enterprise’s capacity to be innovative. Through the creative process, designing a business of the future will capture the spirit of frugal innovation, in which you will focus on doing and providing more with less resource inputs.

In the ideation stage, individuals and teams need support on the refinement of their ideas, mentorship, and networking abilities with other entrepreneurs and supporters. Once your ideas are fully and clearly developed and your value propositions have been defined, you will move to the build stage.

Building an enterprise in and for the future means creating an entity that looks to do more than produce a product or implement your design. Today, we must look at enterprises as equitable and resilient structures that create sustainable profit for the company, its customers, the community, and the ecosystem. This company must center itself in the practices of humane entrepreneurship, in order to create real and lasting patterns of change.

 To be a successful and resilient organization, we must review the fundamentals which include CBKs (common body of knowledge) and then take a step further so that an enterprise can fully understand the entrepreneurial demand of their humane enterprise as well as those demands in human resource management and leadership. In working to build a culture of humane entrepreneurship, you will find your company expanding and creating greater wealth.

 In the early stages of building, while finalizing teams, areas of operation, and seeking funds initially, your enterprise will demand opportunities for early clients, visibility to showcase products and services, and networking ability with other entrepreneurs and supports. Once these steps are established, you can do more to grow your enterprise.

If you are looking to take your business to the next level, the grow stage is for you. One can grow their business through many channels, however, to grow optimally one must be intentionally positioned in the realm of humane entrepreneurship, the practice of operating in a way that centers the human person as a means of creating more job opportunities and greater wealth.

Growing one’s business might be imagined through market share, increasing sales using technology, applying new market strategies, and increasing your firm’s capacity to acquire more resources, such as hiring more personnel. Given the global climate, there are many obstacles preventing you from growing your business in the past and current paradigm. For this reason and the others mentioned above, it is essential that you adapt and evolve to growing your business in the paradigm of the future: humane entrepreneurship.

 In growing an enterprise, we will examine the support and assistance that you might need to grow your business as well as important knowledge, skills, and abilities that you might need to acquire in order to grow your business’s products and services, such as accounting assistance, business planning, cashflow management, contracting and procurement, financing and loan packaging, general entrepreneurial training, growth and scale management, humane resource (HR) management, insurance and bonding, legal resources, licensing, management, marketing, real estate and façade, research and development, risk management, small business diagnostic, strategic planning, supply chain management, tax preparation assistance, and teaming and joint ventures.

 Growing—scale-up and professionalization of your business—requires imagination so that you can not only navigate but also capture the growing opportunities of the future. Interestingly enough (and probably not surprising) depending on how you have managed the designing and building phases as well as depending on your individual firm’s timeline, your needs will be different than others.

 If you are seeking clients and to create efficiencies within your business and to further brand marketing, then your organization necessitates opportunities for clients, potential seed funding, and networking abilities with other entrepreneurs and supporters, whereas if you have a solid client base and consistent revenue stream, you will need opportunities for large scale orders, potential early investment to scale up the business, networking abilities with other entrepreneurs and supporters. On the other hand, if you are a small business and have already established clients and revenue stream, you will be seeking to find investors to grow your business to a greater platform. Your needs will include opportunities for investors, opportunities for expanding your leadership base (i.e. a bord of advisors/directors), mentorship from successful entrepreneurs, and brand recognition.