What is the Maturity Age of Companies?

Individual organisms of the same species mature at different ages. The age at which an individual organism matures, reaches reproductive age, depends on many factors some of which are genetic in addition to availability of resources such as food.

Similarly, in the business world, companies can 'mature' at different ages. Some companies may take 10 years to reach the stage of maturity where it can confidently start spinning off franchises or opening up branches or going multinational. For other companies this period might be greatly reduced. One factor determining the maturity age of a company can, similar to living organisms, be the availability of resources for such company.

Viewing Companies as a Species

It is common that banks would provide credit for companies that are over 2 years old. This screening rule that banks use to filter out budding companies helps banks avoid a lot of bad credit. The reasoning is that statistically it has been show that a large percentage of companies close within the first 2 years of their inception.

It would be interesting to go even deeper with statistics about companies in the same fashion that ecologists use life tables to gather and analyse data about the life and death of organisms. By doing so, one could gain much more insights and be able to understand the business world and the business landscape on a deeper level. Different types of companies can thus be treated as different types of species and a lot can be learned.