Is There Such A Thing As Growing Your Business To Fast?

[Lee]

Ive noticed a lot of companies just lately expanding their employees on an almost weekly basis with one affiliate company having hired a new support / marketing person every week almost for the last 5 weeks.

For a relatively new company do you think this is a good or a bad thing for the long term?

Regards,

Lee

[Chilihost]

Keeping quality is extremely important and as companies grow, it gets harder to find people with the enthusiasm to maintain that quality. Its a pitfall of growing but as long as you hire good people you should be able to avoid it.

cheers,
Luke

[basschick]

i think the most important person a rapidly expanding company can have is a manager to oversee all the new employees - and old ones. a lot of programs hire reps for a percentage, not a salary, and they just send them out there to make mistakes and make us really wonder about their programs...

[gaybucks_chip]

well as someone who used to be a management consultant, and who is dealing with a fast-growing company now, I think there are several things one has to balance.

We added our first employee before we could *quite* afford it... but he quickly paid for himself in getting all of our DVDs out faster, doing our updates, and freeing AJ and I to do the more important long range growth/vision stuff. We've added a second person, and will soon be adding a third. But we have a pretty good idea about our revenues, and have multiple revenue streams, so we're a little buffered as far as an interruption of funds... and we've also been careful to try and only add people when they will directly contribute to our bottom line, or will so effectively free us up that we're able to contribute more work which will directly increase revenue.

I think the risk is of wanting to add employees in order for the owner(s) to do less work, or even just because you *can* afford to add someone is the wrong thing.... and particularly for the first hires, finding someone that is really self-motivated and won't require a lot of handholding is really important too. Once you get past a couple of people, having someone capable of supervising and managing will also be important.

[AusCoding Allan]

I've seen it happen! A company that I used to deal with quite frequently (they are no longer in operation) did exactly that - grow too fast!

The risk of growing the business at an exponential rate is that nobody takes a breather for five seconds to stop and examine just what it is that the company stands for, wants to acheive and plan exactly what direction the business is headed. I believe that it is far more important to consolidate what you have then build and then consolidate again to ensure that what you are doing is sustainable.

That said, businesses can still grow at an extremely rapid pace whilst still maintaining sound business practice. Ideally the systems that you put in place when you start the business should be documented so everyone is reading from the same page, whilst these systems may change over time to accomodate the growing business they will allow you to keep a reality check over how things function.

Cheers,

Allan