Rapid growth - How to prepare for it.

When you're in a high-growth company, things constantly break. 

You’re always putting out some fires and letting others continue to burn while you focus on the most urgent ones that threaten to wind you up. 

And because you’re constantly breaking systems, products, and processes as you scale it’s impossible to catch every recurring problem.

You just get faster at fixing it. 

I first experienced this during our pivot through covid from being a wholesale bakery to a direct-to-customer (D2C) model during lockdowns. 

We went from never selling a product through our website or delivering D2C, to doing 1000+ deliveries per day in the space of a few weeks. 

The growth was insane. It was also incredibly inefficient, messy, broken, chaotic and freaken exciting!!

We were onboarding employees by the dozen and giving them name badges on their chests and back so we could keep track of new people. 

We were implementing dozens of new systems and processes before they were tested. 

We were building the website daily while it was live. And then had an email from Shopify to say we were the fastest-growing food website they’d ever encountered. 

Our products were completely untested in the domestic market so feedback was captured daily and changes were made the following day. 

There was no time for detailed planning - It was all about survival and fixing things that broke. 

In any business experiencing growth like that, every new hire, new product, extra client, or new geography you expand to presents a whole lot of challenges. 

The result is that you end up constantly solving the same problem again at each new level of growth or complexity. 

And THAT’S OKAY!!

You’re not mad. Or stupid. 

It’s just what happens in high-growth situations. 

Read Hoffman talks about it in his book Blitz Scaling. 

What stood out to me in his book was that high growth is often about doing things that don’t scale. 

Things that are messy, a little disorganised, or that you have to fix later but there’s no time now. 

• Problems are expected
• Reporting lines get blurry
• Communications are wack
• Angry clients are a certainty
• Frustrated employees are a given
• Product development is fasttracked

But if you need to move that fast to deploy a product, capture market share, or out-manoeuvre a competitor (or in my case, just survive covid)  - you do what you have to and clean up the mess later!

The reason I’m sharing this today is that most start-ups are exactly like this. 

The covid days for me were like stepping back to the first week of bootstrapping our build.

You've got to be comfortable that it's messy because speed, rapid testing, implementation, and growth are more important - you can fix the rest later.

But I recognise that many people believe that you need to be more strategic. 

Have calculated all the risks and considered all angles.

And that things need to be communicated well before you execute. 

This might be you, or it might be people you hire along the way who want certainty, solid planning, time to be comfortable with ideas and fully test to minimise risk.

The key is to balance it. 

Too much rigid planning and process and you end up moving slowly and never launching a single thing. 

Not enough planning and analysis and you make a series of bad decisions that can knock you out of the great game of business. 

How I’m using this in the future. 

Planning is critical in any team.

Analysis is important to remove risk.

But moving fast on something that has huge potential can be the difference between success and failure.

So I’ll be carving out space to let ideas run wild separate to the day-to-day operation.

It means getting in a room with people who can think big picture and road mapping the potential ‘what if’ type scenarios for special projects we’re sitting on. 

Even if that means testing a few ideas on a small scale to understand the impact. 

Then, when we find the right one, and the timing is right we’ll be ready to launch rapidly.

I hope this helps you think about rapid growth so you’re ready for the opportunities that are coming in the future!