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Key Takeaways All business owners strive for growth, but it can put pressure on every part of a business and expose weaknesses that weren’t evident when things were smaller.
Hiring can’t always keep pace with demand, customer response times start to slip, cash gets tied up before growth pays off, systems that once worked start to break, and culture stretches thinner with every new hire.
The businesses that scale successfully anticipate pressure points early, rather than waiting until employees or customers start to feel them.
All business owners want to hear that their business is growing, but fewer are ready for what growth actually feels like on the inside. Chiefly, growth is the gap between how a company runs at 10 people and how it needs to run at 50.
I’ve spent years helping companies handle the moment when calls and inquiries start outpacing the team’s ability to answer them, and the pattern is always the same: Growth exposes weaknesses that weren’t evident when things were smaller.
None of this means growth should be deliberately avoided or slowed down. Instead, it means the businesses that handle the middle stretch well are the ones that plan for the hurdles before they hit, not after. Here are five of the most common challenges and what to do about each of them.
1. Hiring can’t keep pace with demand
A recent Small Business Credit Survey carried out by the Federal Reserve shows that once businesses have acquired customers and increased their sales, the most frequently cited operational difficulty among firms is hiring or keeping qualified staff. That tracks with what I see constantly: A business lands a wave of new customers, then spends months trying to hire enough people to properly serve them.
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