Overcoming Growth Challenges with Endeavor Romania’s Scale Up Program

Since 2021, when we launched Endeavor’s Romanian chapter, we anticipated that, beyond the relatively known growth challenges faced by all startups around the world, Romanian founded businesses have an additional set of constraints. The size and the structure of the local market, the maturity of the support ecosystem, the availability of help from entrepreneurs who’ve grown regional or global businesses are specific to the Romanian ecosystem. Our strategy was to respond to these issues by making the resources of our global network available to the Romanian challengers.

Three and a half years down the road, after closely watching over 150 Romanian entrepreneurs and attempting to support them in various ways, we proposed to our board the set-up of a structured way of providing our help.

Because Romania now has several early-stage acceleration programs, to leverage better on Endeavor’s global DNA, we decided to complement them with an initiative focused on the next maturity level of a startup. These are scale up companies, i.e. businesses which have reached a certain revenue figure, got some traction in markets beyond Romania and are growing at a fast pace. Thus, the Endeavor Scale Up program was born, aiming at identifying a selected group of founders and providing each of them with an individual plan to navigate the complexities of growth.

What is the Scale Up Program?

We envision the Scale Up program as a comprehensive crash course designed for entrepreneurs in the Seed to Series A stages, who have reached or are close to the EUR 1m recurring revenue milestone (the program is open to companies with recurrent revenues between EUR 500k and EUR 2m). The program provides a customized plan to equip founders with the necessary tools for regional and global expansion, focusing on talent acquisition, strategic partnerships, and financial growth.

Addressing Key Challenges

For the scaleup phase, the main challenges are related to building a growth engine. While this effort revolves around a scalable product, it is underpinned by marketing, sales and partnerships meant at solving the go-to-market challenge for each target market, and a bit later, by customer success making sure the business captures more value and reduces churn. Such prerequisites need to be in place so that once the decision to open a market is taken, an entire sales engine is activated. 

This involves building teams and leveraging suitable partners, ideally after securing funding. And while more money means multiple opportunities for growth iterations, funding is not an endless resource (and, after the ZIRP years, even less so). The Scale Up aims to show how other entrepreneurs have done it before, what their mistakes and key learnings were in the process, and how to efficiently use the funding markets. In the scale up phase, fundraising needs to be focused on seeking investors who can provide help in hiring talent and cracking foreign markets.

How We Achieve This

The program will connect founders with experienced individuals – predominantly entrepreneurs  who have successfully navigated similar growth trajectories. While the bulk of interactions in the program will be between founders and mentors, the program caters also for peer-to-peer learning, by bringing participants together in several events, meant to make them get to know each other and share their experiences. This way, apart from spreading the knowledge more evenly, we foster a sense of camaraderie and community that should go beyond the timeline of the program.

Our Vision

At Endeavor, we believe in the power of predictive pathways — success breeds success, creating a virtuous cycle of growth and support. Romania’s entrepreneurial ecosystem is a work in progress and our goal is to speed it up by nurturing more successful ventures that can, in turn, support others.

The Need for Collaboration

Achieving this vision requires a collective effort. We seek the goodwill, support, and enthusiasm of local ecosystem partners, including investors, accelerators, mentors, angels, and corporate leaders. Together, we can propel our market forward and create a thriving environment for high-growth businesses.

By joining the Scale Up program, entrepreneurs can unlock new opportunities, gain business critical insights, and navigate their growth journey with greater confidence and efficiency. We invite brilliant founders to be part of our inaugural cohort and experience this novel approach to scaling up.