John Carpenter

Most successful startup founders tend to share certain traits - a strong work ethic to work the additional hours required to get the business off the ground; resilience - the ability to bounce back when things go wrong, which they inevitably will; vision - a strong vision for their business which they use to drive everyone else forward; customer-focus - designing products or services with customers in mind, not just for operational efficiency - otherwise they'll never sell anything. The benefit - you don't need a fancy education - you just need these skills.

They should be able to write down how much money is in their business bank account, what their main monthly expenditures are, they should have their statutory filings and any statutory payments diarised - if they don't have this sorted, they risk having their company become insolvent or get closed down involuntarily. Most companies pay for professional company secretarial assistance from a third party, as well as an accountant, to ensure no statutory filings or payments are missed.

There is no perfect time to scale, as scaling involves significant operational disruption whenever it happens. The key point will be when something the business sells has the opportunity to grow expontentially if it is concentrated on - and if complimentary products or services can be added to that offering which can exponentially increase the revenue of the business. Where this is the case, a company should seek to simplify its offering as much as possible to focus all of its energy on selling the scalable products and services only, even if it has to stop selling other profitable products or services that are unable to scale.