5 Reasons Why Your First Company Will Probably Fail — Unless You Make These Changes Scaling a startup is hard — only 0.061% of companies grow to over $50 million. This article will teach you what you need to know to be one of those successful scaling companies.

My colleague and serial entrepreneur, Scot Wingo, recently posted on LinkedIn about how hard it was to scale a business. He referenced data from a book by Verne Harnish. The core of the story was this chart:

• There are 28,000,000 businesses in the U.S.
• 96% of them are under $1MM in revenue (first "valley of death," getting to first $1MM)
• 4% are $1MM-$10MM in revenue (second "valley of death," breaking through $10MM)
• 0.4% are $10MM-$50MM in revenue (third "valley of death," breaking through $50MM)
• Only 0.061% are over $50MM in revenue

I was so taken aback by the data here that I thought it was worthy of a deeper discussion. So, why is it so hard to scale?