What we did to handle overwhelming growth for a very small but burgeoning new industry sub-sector.
Question Prompt: "Assuming you are experiencing growth, the question is how to manage it. Do you let it expand freely, including borrowing money to fund the expansion, or do you control the growth with capital available from the generation of profits at current levels."
https://www.alignable.com/groups/ask-smb-owners-anything?pinned_discussion_id=841689
We had to put the brakes on more than once. Back in 2014 before I had employees at RPG LLC, I was overwhelmed with clients, and tried desperately to find people I could hire, but nobody had the skillset for this newly developing sub-industry.
I am very uncomfortable with debt, and our issues aren't really the kind you can spend your way into solving. Only time backed by effective longitudinal planning and effort could solve the issue.
So I had to create a long-term plan to build the workforce for this burgeoning industry from scratch. Along the way I've created much of our direct competition (unavoidable, but a good sign of healthy market demand, and there is plenty of work (and clients) to go around).
I stopped taking on new clients and organizational partnerships (as much as I hated to), and began focusing on growing the training and the non-profit organization that included training the future workforce. This is slowly, but definitely, paying off. Though at the same time it is spinning up a _lot_ of potential competitors long-term (again, not necessarily a bad thing long-term).
The training materials continue to evolve, the online education platform, books, videos, publishing of training workbooks, have all been helping bit by bit.
I was able to hire my first few employees a few years ago, and this year we now have 6 employees with several more in the training queue. We're trying to get to a minimum of 10 ASAP. (The non-profit is nearing the 200 volunteers mark across 6 continents, though activity varies wildly with volunteers of course).
On the non-profit side we were growing 300% year-after-year (albeit from very small micro numbers), we had to put the brakes on there as well, so at the end of 2020 the board put together a 1 year plan to solidify the foundation to handle such overwhelming demand. We shored up our infrastructure, documentation, processes, training, etc.
We're almost ready, getting all the pieces in place, so that we'll be able in January to open back up the floodgates (at least partway) in 2022 at both the for-profit and non-profit organizations.
We're in the middle of finding new and larger facilities here (we need a minimum 2k-4k sq ft warehouse our current 1750 sqft is packed to the ceiling), and we're once again expanding into other states (in addition to our national mobile facilities and our international online programs).
We're still very, very tiny, but we pack a lot of impact into what we do.
I have still have clients that have been waiting for me (some now waiting 7 years!) to get all the pieces in place and to get to 10 employees to meet their needs.
They want what only we can provide, and no one else can come close (they've tried and been sorely disappointed).
I don't know that I'd recommend this approach for most, because most folks are probably not trying to grow an entire industry from scratch, but perhaps some of these experiences might be useful for some entrepreneurs out there considering different options.
Cheers!
-Hawke Robinson