Scale-Ups Confidence Survey 2023

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Scale-Ups Confidence Survey 2024

An encouraging uptick in confidence

Scale-ups play a crucial role in economies through innovation and job creation, but scaling up in times of geopolitical and economic instability presents formidable challenges. Investors might hesitate to invest in smaller firms and top talent can prefer the security of larger organizations. To clarify the challenges and key focuses of scale-ups, Deloitte conducted a survey with 50 such companies in the Netherlands, aiming to provide valuable insights into their growth trajectories, the obstacles they confront, and their strategic outlook.

Key findings

  • The biggest challenges relate to talent and liquidity
    Some 40% of scale-ups identified finding the right talent as one of the biggest challenges to achieving their growth ambitions, while 38% cited liquidity and funding issues. Liquidity is now a more prominent issue than it was in the 2023 survey.
  • Most scale-ups want to expand their headcount, but they face obstacles
    Although 82% of Dutch scale-ups want to employ more people (up from 75% in 2023), they face multiple obstacles in this respect. Almost two-thirds of respondents highlighted the scarcity in the job market of specific profiles, while 34% flagged candidates’ expectations regarding financial rewards, as a result of the talent war.
  • More Dutch scale-ups confident they can raise more funding
    Of the scale-ups surveyed, 60% are actively seeking additional funding, and 64% of this group feel confident that they will be able to secure what they need – up from 55% in 2023. Venture capitalists remain the most popular source when considering funding.
  • Need for new features and functionality and better sales/lead management
    Some 90% of the respondents identified the development of additional product features and functionality as a high priority for technology investment (up from 78% in 2023). In terms of potential for improvement, 70% of scale-ups identified “optimizing my lead/sales funnel management” (up from 58% in 2023).
  • A key priority for 2024 is new customer acquisition
    For 2024, the surveyed scale-ups are heavily focused on generating new business: 86% of respondents plan to focus on acquiring new customers, and 42% on building partnerships/reseller channels and 42% on product diversification and development. Each of these figures are higher than in the 2023 survey.
  • More scale-ups are confident of future growth
    The proportion of respondents that are highly confident or confident that they can continue or even accelerate their growth trajectory has increased from 80% in the 2023 survey to 91% this year. /span>

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About the survey

This survey is part of the Deloitte NSE Scale-Ups Ecosystem intitiave.

In total, 50 scale-ups based in the Netherlands responded to the 2024 Scale-Ups Confidence Survey. Thirty-eight of the respondents held the position of CEO  or co-founder in their respective organizations.

Scale-ups from multiple segments participated in the survey, with the enterprise software, fintech and digital commerce sectors best represented. More than 90% of the respondents operate at least in the B2B sector, but there are major differences in size. While 42% generate less than €1 million in annual revenue, 12% generate more than €10 million in annual revenue.

More than half the respondents have the equivalent of between 10 and 50 full-time employees, while 6% have more than 100 staff.

Previous surveys

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