11. When Growth Creates Chaos: The Systems That Break First When Your Shop Scales

All right, Paul.

So as I'm thinking about why growth creates chaos, it definitely is the opportunity.

I know in my experience, you know, we all want to grow.

We all are trying to get the next customer.

We're all trying to get those larger orders.

And you've got the buildup, the lead up to getting to that point.

But once that new work actually comes, it's just not all a bed of roses.

No,

it's never plain sailing.

But I would say there's not a business owner out there that isn't dreaming of their business doubling in size, right? And if you're not, you're probably not ambitious enough as a business owner, right? Everybody wants to grow.

The problem with rapid growth is the lack of stability that it brings.

And I guess that's what we're going to talk about on the show.

Rapid growth sometimes is a real test of the stability of the business.

Rapid growth tends to, at times, outpace our infrastructure.

What you've got set up as a business, it can stretch your financial resources and even your capacity of your managers and your management systems.

While increasing the sales are positive, everybody wants it, they can become a liability if the organization doesn't can't support the new demand, it can lead to operational chaos, cash shortages, and then reduced quality, which is reputational damage.

Yeah, that's it.

And you think about those growth months, like I think we all have gone through months where we have like really, really great months.

Maybe you're kind of drifting along your stable and then all of a sudden you have a really big month and it does create this atmosphere where It's like you're running around, you're just trying to like, you know, patch things up, make sure that you get this done, get that done, get all these things together, just trying to get product out the door.

But so often, I think that's what I've seen is that that growth can start to expose growth.

a weaker system and making sure that you've laid that groundwork for the growth, which is also difficult because working on those businesses and creating product is one major part of it.

But developing the system that runs your business is probably more important for that long-term growth because those systems have to be able to support growth.

that growth in the future

that's right so sometimes in business we can see a hump coming in our schedule right and we just think well we're just going to work hard we're just going to run a little bit of overtime we're going to get over this hump and sometimes that hump doesn't turn into a hump but it exponentially grows and you never step back and all of a sudden you become out of control and unprepared for the growth.

And I think that's the most dangerous, right? And that's what we're going to focus on on tonight's show is whenever you get unexpected growth, a little, a little overtime is fine, but when that becomes the norm and you start just working harder and your people start working harder and you start to stretch your business without actually your systems and infrastructure growing, it's really dangerous.