The Hidden Cost of Fast Growth

Everyone wants fast growth…

…until it arrives and starts breaking everything.

In this episode, we unpack what really happens when your business suddenly takes off. From crashing sales systems to overwhelmed teams and neglected back-office functions, we walk you through what typically breaks first when growth accelerates… and how to stay ahead of it.

You’ll learn:

• What systems fail first during rapid growth (and why it’s often your sales flow)
• Why downstream issues like customer service and fulfillment become business-critical
• The overlooked danger of not adjusting your financial and tax infrastructure
• How to plan for scale without overwhelming your team or destroying trust
• Why thinking in systems, not just departments, is the key to sustainable success

Whether you’re preparing to scale or already feeling the pressure, this episode helps you anticipate challenges and create a roadmap to grow with confidence and clarity.

Speaking of a roadmap, let’s create yours together here.

“Fixing a bottleneck without checking downstream is how great businesses crash.” – Anna Angelova

Transcript of “What Breaks First When Your Business Grows Fast?”

The transcript below was automatically generated. Please ignore any errors or inconsistencies in the text.

Anna Angelova   0:05
Hello, hello, hello. It’s a brand new week. It’s Monday one more time and this is your favorite daily podcast, more than just task management, specifically designed for business owners like you where we help you build a thriving business.
With me and Angelova, business coaching consultant, and my fellow co-host, Joris Minusfand, the business consultant. Morning, Joris.

Jores Minasvand   0:33
Good morning, Ghana. Great to be here. Happy Monday. What beautiful topic are we covering today?

Anna Angelova   0:39
The topic for today is All about the systems that break first when your business starts growing fast. And this is, I know that this is a problem we All want to have. We All want to have a business that it grows.

Jores Minasvand   0:48
Oh boy.

Anna Angelova   0:57
Fast like on on that upward trajectory and being prepared for this kind of growth, exponential growth will really help you create a thriving business, so.
First and foremost, I would actually start the conversation with what it means to growing fast. And there are actually, if you think, if you think about the flow of the business and how things work like you have marketing like you have.
You need to attract people to you, people to come to you and then whether it’s like online business, whether it’s brick and mortar, whatever it is like you need people to come to you. And then of course you need to turn these people into customers like they need to pay for your product, services, whatever you’re offering.
So I would say that with this in mind how it goes and of course after they pay you, you deliver whatever it is, the product, the service you deliver it. So with this kind of simple flow of the way things work when you think about this.
The first thing is that that can actually break and breaks for for some businesses who are not prepared is the sales itself because they have so much demand that so many people come that their sales process.
Breaks down and now this can be something that happens again both in the physical world like brick and mortar and online and online. Also another thing that that breaks can be if you don’t have capacity if your website can can crash if too.
Many people try to purchase at the same time. So the first bottleneck that you want to look at, looking from this perspective of how things flow of course is your sales, how, how you.
How you sell to people like your website, can it handle the the volume? If it’s sales calls, whatever it is like you want to make sure that that that sales process handles things well.

Jores Minasvand   3:13
Yeah, it’s the conversion as as well. You’re putting a lot of money into marketing. You market to all these people. But if your conversion sales part is not ready, you’ll actually lose customers. You’ll waste all that marketing money that that you put in.
To to attract like so it’s very important to make sure that your sales is aligned and you have all the tools like you mentioned the people, the processes and the technology, the website and and and CRM and everything to be able to to convert those customers.
And now that you have your sales in matching with your marketing where you can handle the increased volume, then it comes to your delivery.
Now how do you how do you manage? All of a sudden you go from 10 orders a day to 100 orders a day. Do you have the right shipping material? Do you have the right people? Do you have the right even suppliers to bring you the material if you’re reselling stuff and packaging stuff?
If you’re delivering services, instead of making 10 calls a day, now you’re making 100 calls a day. You you may be receiving 150 to 200 emails a day. You were only answering any 7 to 8 emails. Do you have the right capacity to receive those emails, not to miss them?
So it’s it’s also very important. I mean if you if you look at the just the three parts marketing, sales and delivery, if you identify a bottleneck in one of them, it’s a good thing. So you then put the money and effort and time into.
Fixing that bottleneck. But before you apply the fix, you identify the fix and say, OK, I’m ready to pull the plug, let’s go. Before you do that, you look downstream and say, OK, now I’m going to increase my sales 10 tenfold 10X from 10 to 100 orders a day. Do I have the warehouse?
Do I have enough materials before you pull the plug? The reason is if you yes, you you you fixed your marketing, you fixed your sales. Now all of a sudden there are orders, but people are not receiving their orders. What that will do, it will be detrimental to your brand.
Once you start losing customers, once you start losing trust, you will never get them back and there may be a time that you’ll it will be the end of your business. You need to be very, very careful and then we’ll talk about more what happens after the sales in in a in a minute, but.
What are your thoughts on this, Anna?

Anna Angelova   6:04
When it comes to the delivery, yes you you want to make sure like you said the materials like do do you have whatever is needed and materials is also if you have a restaurant or or a bakery or something like this and suddenly you have a a line of of people who are waiting.
Waiting to buy your awesome sandwich for for lunch or whatever it is. And suddenly in the middle of the rush hour, lunch rush hour, you run out of ingredients.
Right. So you don’t want to get into that kind of situation. That’s why I love what you said, Joris, how, yes, as a business in business, like we always look at, OK, what’s, where’s the bottleneck? Like what’s the thing that we need to focus on so the business can grow?
However, it’s really important to look downstream like to to look like OK if the bottleneck is here and we fix it, then what happens after that? Run simulations and see oh oopsie if if we get even forget about 10X like even if we get.
Two times more people than we are getting right now, we will end end up not having enough resources and of course resources. Although I don’t like the word resources, but ultimately within that category of resources it’s also people.
Like do you have the team that that can handle this? Because in some situations when your people are involved, when you have like services for example where like you need someone to deliver this.

Jores Minasvand   7:36
Mm.

Anna Angelova   7:53
And you have a-team of like two people who are already working at capacity or close to capacity, then what happens? And that’s why we talked that last week we talked a little bit about this. So where I mentioned that when it comes to hiring, there is one rule of thumb that.

Jores Minasvand   8:01
Mhm.

Anna Angelova   8:12
You want to hire. Ideally you want to hire six months in advance, kind of like you want to hire based on where your business will be six months from now so that people can get onboarded, get used to these things.
So absolutely everything you said was spot on and you did hint to the next part, which is in a way the tail end of of the whole flow. So if we think about marketing, sales and the delivery.
It’s not the system that breaks first, but it’s the tail end that you still want to monitor and keep an eye on. So and and there are actually a couple that come to my mind right now as we’re talking about this customer service is is 1, right?
Like if if you have customer service, this is one thing that it’s more towards the end of the whole thing. But like you said, Joris, if people are buying but not receiving like you, let’s say you have e-commerce and Amazon ruined it for everyone that they deliver.
Same day delivery or or next day delivery and if someone buys from you and they don’t receive it in two days, what happens with your customer service, right? Like how flooded will they be with All the requests and All the questions and requests for refunds maybe even?
So this is one kind of tail end system that you want to make sure it’s working and if you don’t have customer service, maybe it turns out that you need one. So it’s not that that it might break, it’s like a system that you might need to.
Set up and have in place and then the other hidden one or more like towards the tail end that call them back office.

Jores Minasvand   10:08
They call them back office.

Anna Angelova   10:11
Yeah, back office services and the other one is your finances, making sure that your financial system handles this and I’m giving one example in Jorisec, you can chime in as well and and talk about this tail end back end back back.

Jores Minasvand   10:11
They call back office services.

Anna Angelova   10:30
Office kind of services. One example is taxes because like OK, your business has been at a certain level, now suddenly you 10X.
If if you keep your tax allocation at at whatever you you were having before that, you will be in trouble come spring, come come spring.

Jores Minasvand   11:01
Yeah, you’ll be writing a big fat check at the at the end of your fiscal year when your taxes come in and I I cannot, I would say Wendy, I think we talked about statistics a few weeks ago where I think 65% of businesses.
They go away the first end of first second year and there’s a reason for the second year and I think a big chunk of that 65% is because of taxes where people don’t pay attention because in especially in in Canada and Ontario.
There’s this misconception that you don’t have to pay taxes for the first year of your business, which is the it’s a business killer and it’s the wrong impression. You don’t have to pay tax installments for the first year.
Because you don’t have a revenue like you don’t know a revenue after the first year when you when you file your first year’s taxes, then the government knows based on last year your business is going to be this year. So they project give you a program now you have to start paying installments. So a lot of people oh I don’t have.
You have to pay taxes for the first year. They go and spend all the money at the end of the the year, tax year comes and there you just owe $55,000 owing $55,000 to Revenue Canada. I’m talking about Canada at 17% and I think it was 17 is probably higher now.
Interest. It will take you probably five to seven years to pay off if you’re lucky and having this. So you’re right, be careful. Look at the whole thing. Don’t look at it at the individual component. Don’t look at marketing and say I have a marketing problem.
Have to solve it. Yes you do. But once you find a solution, then look at it in the entire system as a system. Think in systems. I love what you keep saying this. Anna and you sort of brought me into this as well. I was doing it, but I wasn’t doing it consciously. But you need to do it in.
Think about the systems. And I brought up this example of this company that I worked with years ago. They had a problem with their website. The website was too slow. People wouldn’t stay on. So we solved the problem, found the problem, solved the problem, and then we asked the owner. I asked the owner, should we apply it? Yes, yes, yes, go for it.
Let’s go. So on a Saturday we applied the the the solution. By the next Saturday they were inundated with orders. They actually had to add an entire shift to their warehouse.
And they were running out of materials. So they had to go back to their suppliers and tell their suppliers, oh, bring 10 like we need to 10X the order. So that keeps the supplier, gives the supplier a surprise. Maybe the supplier is not busy, is not ready to send you 10X. So it’s just a ripple effect where, OK, you know this now go.
Go and talk to your suppliers. I’m about to 10X my orders to you. Go to the to your warehouse, my operations manager and say can you handle you’re handling 5 to 10 orders a night? Can you handle 100? Can you handle 250?
So look at it from a systems perspective and and make sure that that you cover it end to end and one of these back office, two of the most important although they call it back office but you put it shouldn’t put it in the back burner are accounts receivable and payable.
If you don’t pay attention to your accounts receivable, you leave money on the table. You don’t charge you product, service, whatever it is, you don’t.
Collect. You’re going to go bankrupt. Very simple. Your money is going to go out. Money is not going to come in. You’re done. Very simple mathematics. There’s no feelings or inclusion or anything about this. It’s just it’s simple.
The second one is accounts payable. If you don’t pay your suppliers, guess what they will do?
They’ll cut you off. You don’t have supplies. Oops. All of a sudden your website will go offline because you didn’t pay the the supplier that that hosts your website or the the the toy company that brings the toys to your factory or the guy that transportation that picks up your orders.
So it’s a think about it from a systems perspective. Identify the bottleneck, identify the solution and then sit back and say what is this gonna do upstream? No, mostly because you’re already if you are a bottleneck, then upstream there’s something right downstream. What happens to downstream systems?
Why am I ready? Do I have the people? And then maybe what you do is you don’t lift the floodgate all at once. Maybe you say, OK, I know I have a problem, but I don’t want to go from 10 orders a night a weeknight to 250 orders a weeknight. Maybe I want to go to 50 or or 100 first.
Adapt and go. Maybe then you don’t just yank the the the floodgate, you slowly lift it to allow like they do with dams. You just let the pressure off, see how things react, how things work out. Then you organically grow it or maybe fast.
With fast. So yeah, again, look at it from a systems perspective end to end.

Anna Angelova   16:41
Yes.

Jores Minasvand   16:42
I know I digressed all over the place, but.

Anna Angelova   16:44
Oh, it was fantastic. Everything you said was fantastic and I just want to add one thing before we wrap things up and looking at it from a whole system is absolutely downstream. Like you said, upstream something is working like you are getting up to the bottleneck. You are getting things like so things are working well.
Looking at the whole system though, it’s not just downstream, it’s also like the system and system also includes some of the things we were talking about. It’s in a way it’s not exactly downstream, it’s supports support parts. So they’re not downstream per se. It’s not like linearly or this.
This follows they’re actually part of the system. They’re support things out there, right? Support systems that that help with this whole flow. And when you look at it from the perspective of a system, of course, one of the things that happens is that.
You might actually realize is that all the way that the system works, this thing will come back to something that’s hope happening upstream as well. So you know like it as you look at it from a system. So this is the only thing I just wanted to mention that downstream and support like that’s why we mentioned the customer service.
At least that’s why we mentioned the the financial financial system and in general people like in general people this is one of the biggest thing also is like one of the things is that especially when you are going to that leaps from your 10X in your business.
You probably might have already read and heard of this idea in the book with the title that what got you here will not get you there. This applies to your team as well that the team that that got you to being $1,000,000 business.
Might not and most likely will not be the team that gets you to be a $10 million business and then if you want to grow even further again this will not be the same team. So like really looking at it from a systems perspective and.
This allows you also to think about knowing that OK, these are the systems that break will break first when we open the the the flood gate. Then it allows you to actually plan things and George like you mentioned if you want to instead of opening the flood gates like just a little bit slower but also plan.
In terms of let’s focus on these things and these are our this is the in priority order. Let’s put these things in place and then the other ones like the supporting ones, they’re not with the priority. So we can monitor and do work a little bit later really allow you to.
Execute with intention and grow with intention. So yeah, this is it for today from my perspective. Anything else to Azure is?
Muted. Muted.

Jores Minasvand   19:47
I know we covered it. We covered everything. I think we’re we’re good. It’s it’s think before you act, basically common sense.
And and if you don’t know how to act, call us. We have experience.

Anna Angelova   19:56
If you don’t know.
Oh yes, absolutely, absolutely. The drive 360 is the what we have the service we provide for businesses, small, mid sized businesses to help with this, to help with this like really look at your business and tell you.
This is the path. This is the roadmap. You want to 10X your business. This is the roadmap. This is how you do it without going crazy, without burning out, without overwhelming yourself and your team. And do it in a way that’s sustainable, in a way that really allows you to.
Build the business you want to have. So I’ll add the link. Thanks for great reminder. Thanks for it and I’ll add the link to the drive 360. We do work with two to four clients at most 4, usually a couple of clients a month because like we really get into.
Understanding your business, what’s going on and helping you, creating that roadmap for you, that path ahead for you. So we do limit like we do what we talk about like we don’t open floodgates like we limit it to two clients a month.
Sometimes 4, it’s really rare. If it’s just small businesses, like really small solopreneurs, yes, we might work with up to four a month. Usually it’s two. So if if you want to explore, I would highly recommend for you to submit your application so we can have a conversation as soon.
As possible and see when we can do this work for you, if it’s a fit. So great, great reminder. Thank you, Joris.

Jores Minasvand   21:33
Thank you. Bye, bye.

Anna Angelova   21:34
Bye, bye.