Navigating the Risks of Business Growth: Balancing Development and Service Quality

When I used to work as an IT staff and dealt with vendors, I often wondered why a company that was once good eventually became less good. Is it because of their destiny 🤭, because good people resigned, or because of something else?

After building my own business, one of the main reasons for the possible decline in service quality is that the company is growing and developing!

Of course, no one wants to run a stagnant business, right? Businesses are meant to grow and develop, as expressed in prayers at company events. However, if not careful, the growth and development of a company can lead to many problems that, if not anticipated and managed well, can potentially cause issues.

For example, five years ago, the company only consisted of 2 people and had ten client companies. It was pretty busy to handle the project, but with hard work, the company could run well and subsequently opened opportunities for more clients. A few years later, clients increased to dozens or even hundreds. The company may have added more resources, but business math is not ten divided by 2 = 5 and then 100 divided by 5 = 20. This means that even if the number of personnel increased to 20 people, it might not be able to handle everything well. One hundred clients do not necessarily have 10x the problems of 10 clients. It could be less or even more. Often, it’s more.

Moreover, not all 20 recruits have the same capabilities as the company’s two founders. In practice, companies only sometimes add personnel as the number of clients increases. If you keep adding, what happens when a client stops subscribing? Do you immediately lay off staff? This is why I can understand why some businesses set a time limit.

For example, a fried chicken seller who has a lot of visitors still makes the same amount every day, even if some visitors are disappointed because they run out. Why not increase the number of sales and increase the number of servers? Because the fried chicken seller does not want to disappoint customers who get lower-quality fried chicken. It’s better to be disappointed by running out of fried chicken because there is a possibility that he will come back tomorrow than to be disappointed by the quality, which may lead to the bigger problem: he never comes back again.

Does this mean we need to stop the growth and development of a growing and developing company? Of course not. It is important to anticipate and manage it well so the company can grow and develop sustainably.

The overall message is that as the company grows, there could be a potential for things to go wrong; it is crucial to managing the growth well so that the company can grow sustainably without compromising the quality of service.

Image by Lenka Pileková from Pixabay

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