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- August 24, 2019
When You’re Growing Rapidly out of Control
Remember those days when you were just one individual starting a business. All you had to help you was your vision and your hard work. But even then, who really knows if those two things will be enough to reach success?
Eventually you did start to gain traction. Things started occurring, the ball started rolling and quickly you began to hire employees, move into an office, stabilize your consumer base, get your marketing campaign to focus and you became a name. As the years went on, you started to get used to expanding and growing but you could always manage with demand, expectations and additional responsibilities. But one day, your business really took off. Something happened whereby all the planets aligned and you became a business of so much potential and interest. Now your only problem is growing out of control.
Things Are Heating Up
When an economy grows too rapidly, economists call it ‘heating up’. This is because too much growth too fast is kind of like a runaway train. Putting the brakes on before it goes out of control is how you keep the train on the tracks. This is the dilemma you have when your business is growing out of control. On the surface it looks like it’s a problem you wouldn’t mind having. However heating up causes a number of issues.
- Not good hirings: When you expand too fast, you’re unable to properly vet people you hire. A lesser quality overall, of your employees will be the end result.
- Culture sacrifice: Taking the time to integrate new people into your business allows you to maintain your company culture. When you simply have to hire out of necessity to increase numbers you will dilute your culture and maybe even had it disappear.
- Cash flow: Growth of any kind demands capital. Cash flow management becomes a serious issue. You have new customers, clients and partners with invoices, you have many more orders than ever before. Keeping a track of how much you’re bringing in and how much is going out is substantial challenge.
Your Online Infrastructure
For everything you do online you need servers. The simple fact of the matter is, that when you expand rapidly you simply need to buy more servers. However this can be a costly and time-consuming process. The alternative is something like a VPS which is a virtual private server. Here are some of the cheapest windows vps which come in 2GB, 4GB and 8GB. The lowest price is $9,95 per month making it a much more affordable prospect than the physically buying the hardware and running your own servers. The other aspects of the online infrastructure is cloud storage. When you’re rapidly expanding out of control, you need to quickly buy more storage space which of course is linked back to servers and bandwidth.
Rapid growth seems like an issue every business would want. However, heating up is a frequent consequence which leads to more problems than the growth spurt can fix. Be careful, expand with expert planning and the right kind of resources.