If you spend any amount of time on the internet as an online business owner, you’ve seen coaches, consultants and service providers boasting massive revenue growth and “the secrets to how they did it.”
And while scaling is exciting and ultimately the goal for most of us, no one talks about the challenges that come along with rapid growth – even though behind the scenes, we’re ALL dealing with them.
The social media highlight reel often fails to mention the reality of scaling – the failures, the painful lessons, and the costly mistakes. From cash flow crunches to misfires and burnout, growth often brings an entirely new set of problems that can take you out of the game completely, if you’re not careful.
Below, we’re breaking down the truths of rapid business growth challenges and how to navigate them successfully, so that:
- You can rest assured that you’re not alone, and
- You can equip yourself and your team with the tools to withstand any difficult business season and come out on top despite it.
Is The Writing on the Walls? Here Are The Warning Signs of an Unsustainable Growth Trajectory
If your company is growing at a rapid pace, it’s critical to recognize red flags before they derail you and/or your team. Those red flags are often dressed up as:
- Gaps in cash flow: your revenue is growing, but expenses are outpacing the cash coming in. This might look like making sales but struggling to make payroll.
- Team burnout: your team may be taking on additional responsibilities as the business and customer count grows, without you realizing – which can lead to overworking, exhaustion, ultimately resulting in performance issues or even turnover.
- Decreased customer results or retention: without a solid plan for client onboarding and management to results, customer satisfaction may drop as you take on more and more customers.
- Unclear market positioning: as you launch new offers ,and/or expand into new verticals, your brand identity may get diluted and result in market confusion and a slowdown in lead generation or engagement.
Conducting a Self-Assessment for Growth: Is Your Team Equipped to Handle The Added Fuel?
When preparing for a high growth year, you want to take a hard look at your team’s readiness so you can plug the gaps before getting too deep in the weeds. Consider factors like:
- Your team’s current capacity and workload: is your team operating at maximum capacity? Can roles and responsibilities shift based on who has more capacity to support in certain areas?
- Customer experience: when it comes to your team members managing clients directly, will they be able to handle an influx in new business? Can your team maintain high service quality and client satisfaction as the company scales, or will client results suffer, ultimately impacting retention, renewals, and referrals?
- Repeatable systems, defined standard operating procedures, and strong infrastructure: are your internal processes, software, and operational frameworks scalable beyond what you’re currently managing, or will they break down at scale?
- Recruiting and hiring: do you have a streamlined recruiting and onboarding process in place to hire and onboard new team members without slowing down results or losing profitability? Are current team members producing more than what they cost the business?
- Finances: Does your business have the necessary cash, credit lines, or financial strategies in place to support the upfront costs of growth and necessary investments (such as new hires, advertising, tools and technology, or necessary coaching, support or mentorship required to sustain growth).
If you find yourself hesitating or answering “no” to any of these, you may want to consider getting more hands-on support.
Inside Empire Builders, we work with established 6 and 7-figure CEOs to implement scalable sales and marketing systems and build winning teams that can own and drive results.
The Challenges of Managing Fast Company Growth – and How to Prevent Common Obstacles
Scalable Solutions That Don’t Slow Growth
If you want to expand, you must look at reinventing your offers, your service delivery, your sales processes – in a way that allows you to service customers one-to-many and acquire customers one-to-many, even beyond what you’ve been able to do up until now.
When it’s harder and more expensive to acquire customers, like it is today, you have to become more efficient and reinvent your perspective on productivity.
This shift is essential for expanding your reach without sacrificing quality or personalized experiences.
This means finding new ways to provide high-quality, scalable solutions that can serve multiple people at once – without sacrificing personalization or high-touch support that so many premium customers value.
This might look like creating hybrid group/1:1 programs, digital products, or automated systems for sales, onboarding, and renewals, that maintain your high standards while expanding reach.
Your sales process will also require a significant transformation. As you shift out of being the sole sales operator and into a true CEO role while your team takes on more responsibility, it’s crucial to have repeatable sales systems in place (like The Live Launch® Method) that they can use to get results.
What slows many CEOs down is that when they’re hustling to reach their first 7-figures, they know how to serve market and sell. It’s in the delegation process that effectiveness gets lost, and suddenly they become the bottleneck to driving the same level of results because their team can’t sustain rapid growth and scale.
This shift also requires strong leadership. As you move to serve more clients and reach more people, you’ll need to rely heavily on your team to deliver consistent results across the board.
Your role will evolve from a hands-on manager to an outside observer, ensuring that your team has the tools, systems, and autonomy to execute without your direct involvement at every stage.
Inside our Leadership Vault, you can find resources for effectively shifting from just “managing” your team to collaborating, mentoring, and ultimately becoming that outside observer who can be hands-off while results continue with or without you.
Mental Health and Leadership Burnout
The emotional toll of leading a rapidly scaling company is no joke.
A survey by The National Institute of Mental Health found that 49% of entrepreneurs report feeling stressed and overwhelmed, with anxiety and depression being the most common challenges.
As a business leader, neglecting your mental and physical health not only hinders the growth of your company, but it impacts your relationships, your family unit, and ultimately your own personal well-being.
Scaling is a mental game, and the first thing we recommend for rapid-growing business owners is to adopt the mindset and habits of the an 8 or 9-figure business owner before you get into the mechanics of scaling.
It’s essential to integrate strategies for mental and physical health into your daily routine in order maintain your energy, focus, and effectiveness as a leader. You can mitigate risks of burnout and find balance through prioritizing:
- Nutrition: eat a balanced diet to maintain energy levels and focus. Consider having healthy meals prepped in advance on days where calls consume most of your day, so that you don’t have to opt for the unhealthy Door dash delivery. Ultra-processed foods can lead to energy crashes and irritability that negatively impact performance.
- Exercise: don’t neglect your physical wellbeing in the process of scaling – especially if you’re operating online and sitting at a desk or on Zoom most of the day. Aim for at least 30 minutes of moderate exercise, and if you can’t swing time – consider taking calls outside while you walk or investing in a walking pad for your office. Moving your body will give you back the mental clarity you need to make strategic, high-stakes decisions.
- Faith: for many leaders, integrating faith into their daily lives provides a sense of purpose and peace. Whether through prayer, meditation, or reflective reading, these practices offer an opportunity for spiritual nourishment and grounding.
- Meditation and mindfulness: Practicing mindfulness or meditation for just 10-15 minutes a day can drastically reduce stress and enhance focus. Apps like Headspace or Calm provide easy-to-follow guided sessions that fit into even the busiest of schedules.
- Family time: Setting boundaries with your phone and creating “tech-free” moments with your family can help you disconnect from work and reconnect with what truly matters. If the business is growing but you’re sacrificing the relationships that matter most, then what are you doing it for?
Additionally, time-blocking can give you the focus you need to get important tasks done but still build a business around your core priorities.
Allocate time on your calendar for the key business activities like visibility, content, team calls and client-facing activities – but build them around your life.
When clients join our Empire Builders program, one of the first tasks we work on together is developing a CEO-schedule that works with your limited time – so you can prioritize profit-producing activities without sacrificing health, family time, or personal wellbeing. .
Rapid Scaling and Cash Flow
Growth is expensive.
Payroll, tech upgrades, and marketing costs (think advertising and SEO support) surge before revenue sometimes has a chance to catch up.
According to the U.S. Bank, 82% of business failures stem from mismanaging cash flow.
That’s why expense forecasting is critical, and paying attention to numbers on a DAILY basis is key.
Maintaining Client Experience
As your business scales, maintaining a high-quality customer experience becomes harder and harder. Fast-growing companies often see customer retention drop if they don’t proactively scale their client service teams and automate key processes, like onboarding.
Consider staffing for growth in advance of key conversion events like Live Launches and being prepared ahead of time with streamlined onboarding in place.
Keeping company culture intact during seasons of rapid expansion
Culture dilution is a real risk when it comes to fast growth – especially as you evolve from a small core team to a fully-robust organization with employees at all stages, from executive leadership, mid-level manager and entry-level producer roles.
If you want to maintain culture at scale, avoid sacrificing weekly 1:1s with direct reports, as well as full team calls where you’re regularly reinforcing company mission and values.
Identify opportunities to coach, mentor, train and develop key players into their next level of leadership – and take the time to really understand what motivates and drives them to want to succeed.
Then, design bonuses and comp plans to reward performance with incentives that truly matter to them as an individual.
Additionally, when managing remote teams, consider meeting in-person with top performers to support them in their roles through 1:1 mentorship.
Remember: growth can be a sprint, but scalable growth happens when preparation meets opportunity.
The most successful CEOs and business leaders know that sustainable, scalable growth requires financial foresight, leadership resilience, and true operational excellence.
Proactively addressing the common challenges of scaling and taking preventative measures before these challenges arise makes all the difference in maintaining a positive culture of high performance, predictable results, and most importantly: happy clients.
