Business expansion can be a glorious thing, especially when it’s rapid and your company is growing fast. It’s wonderful to see your business take on more clients and new employees.

However, a boom in business can be bad if not handled correctly and may actually end up being the downfall of your company if the negative aspects aren’t dealt with quickly. It can be hard during the boom to create a step-by-step approach, but a proactive plan will be really useful during the rapid growth period.

Figure out what kind of growth you are experiencing

Firstly, you must work out whether your rapid growth will be long term or short term, and whether you want it that way. For example, you could have more customers during the summer, but it dies down in the winter. You need to analyse trends and when it’s been busy in the past to figure out if the boom is likely to be short-lived, or a thing your company are going to have to adapt to.

Have an objective

What do you want to achieve from the rapid growth of your business? Having an objective can really stabilise all the craziness happening around you. When you fixate on one goal, you can then figure out everything you need to achieve it. You need to make sure all your employees are fully equipped to handle the boom in business and that you have enough money to handle the fast growth.

Make sure everyone is ready

Growth can only be successful if everyone is on board. Rapid growth requires ambition. Whether it’s ambition to either get through the irregular, busy period, or to adapt to a new, larger way of working, your employees need to want your business to succeed.

Organisation is key

Rapid growth requires rapid organisation. You need to identify leaders and your best team members. Everyone needs to be up to date on the plan going forward and understand what their individual mission is. If their role has changed because of the rapid growth, you need to retrain the employee and bring them up to speed on what their new position requires of them.

Create a growth team

While your other employees are getting on with their usual day-to-day tasks, you could create a team specifically to deal with the issues that rapid growth bring. You could either bring together current employees you think would be ideal for the job of handling the speed of which your business is growing or hire a whole new team to deal with the problems. It’s ideal to have a full-time team working on growth, as individuals working part-time, won’t have enough resources or time to spend on the matters.

Forecast and control costs

No-one knows what the future holds but looking at your cash inflow and outflow can be a great way of working out how much money you’ll need during the growth period. You can restructure areas that need improving and cut and control costs where necessary. Prepare for office moves, new salaries and more equipment. You may need to reschedule debts and payments and spread them over a longer period of time.