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Business Growth Stage 3: Rapid Growth

DESCRIPTION

The Rapid Growth Stage is where the organization’s past and future collide. As a result of its early growth, the organization is now much larger and becoming much more complex. The company’s very success has created the need for a fundamentally different way of managing and operating.

The focus in the Rapid Growth Stage is on scaling operations and building the organizational infrastructure necessary to support growth and complexity. It’s no longer enough to simply add more people, money, technology, and space to cope with growth. This means that the organization needs to bring its people, systems, and management capabilities in line with the new demands of the much larger business it has become.

In many ways, the Rapid Growth Stage of a company is the most difficult phase to manage, because it is the time when a company is going through the greatest set of market, people, operational, and organizational changes.

TRANSCRIPT

Rapid Growth is the stage where the organization’s past and future collide.

On the surface, the only apparent difference between a small company and a large company is the amount of revenue and market share.

But it’s not that simple.

As a result of its early growth, the organization is now much larger…and becoming much more complex. Demand for the company’s product or service is dramatically increasing. There’s more revenue, more customers, more people, and more complexity. And the company is beginning to experience more frequent and severe organizational problems.

The company’s very success has created the need for a fundamentally different way of managing and operating.

It’s no longer enough to simply add more people, money, technology, and space to cope with growth.
Now that the company has become much larger and has very different needs, the organization has to bring its people, systems and management capabilities in line with these new demands.

For long-term success, you have to adapt to the changing needs of your company as it grows.
Companies that don’t make this transition will remain relatively small, stumble or even fail.

To scale your company, you need to strengthen your organization’s infrastructure and develop the capabilities needed to handle rapid growth.

Lots of new people will need to be hired, trained, and managed. A strong management team will need to be built. Gaps in the company’s functional expertise and experience will need to be filled. Basic operational systems will need to become more robust.

A variety of management systems will be needed to coordinate activity, provide direction, make better decisions, eliminate confusion, assure goals are being met, and so on.

And the development of the people that will be needed to run the company as it grows has to become a priority.

Only if the organization makes this critical transition will it be able to succeed on a really big scale.