So, your events business is going from strength to strength, you’re scaling up and you’re taking on new staff – congratulations!

But managing fast growth can be tricky, sometimes even derailing successful businesses. Here are 6 challenges you might face along the way and how to manage them.

1. Choosing the wrong people to work with

When you start growing your business and adding staff, it’s easy to take on the people who are already around, such as friends, family, friends of friends. Although this might seem like the simplest way to get help when you need it, it can be a big mistake.

Before choosing anyone to work with, you should think carefully about the skills and experience your team needs and how each person will fit in with your longer-term business plans. The same goes for suppliers, partners and investors.

Always take the time to write a job description, setting out what you want from the new recruit and be sure to undertake a proper recruitment process. The person you ultimately employ could still end up being an acquaintance but at least this way, you’ll be certain they are indeed the best person for the job.

Related: How to manage temporary staff at your event

2. Over-stretching yourself

When things are going well it might be tempting to take on every opportunity that comes your way, to host more and more events or keep on selling tickets and pushing capacity.

But biting off more than you can chew, when you don’t have the resources or the experience can be a recipe for disaster. One bad event can be enough to ruin your reputation, so always keep it manageable. Focusing on quality over quantity is the best strategy for sustainable long-term growth.

Related: How to motivate an event sales team

3. Inexperience

Even though you’re the boss, there will be times when you’re not sure what to do. In a fast growth business, you might easily find yourself out of your depth.

To deal with this you need to bring in the right talent. Don’t be too proud to employ people ‘smarter’ than you and to allow those with the relevant experience to manage those aspects of your business that you possibly cannot, finance for example.

You should also try to find a mentor to help you tackle the challenges you face – an experienced entrepreneur or business executive can provide invaluable advice, since they’ve already been there, seen it, done it.

Related: How to find and utilise a great mentor

4. Spending too much

 It’s often thought that one can spend themselves to the top – you’ve got to speculate to accumulate, right? But if you place too much focus on investing in new staff, new equipment, new premises etc. you could quickly find yourself in hot water – cashflow can be precarious in fast growth businesses.

Instead, investment should be countered by savings. It’s not all about growing upward and outward. Regularly evaluate your business to see what is no longer needed and cut back any fat. It’s vital not to let your costs scale faster than your revenue, so trimming back can be just as important as expansion for long-term success.

Related: How much is your event worth? Putting a price on your exhibition, conference or show

5. Failure to automate

When you start small it’s usual to do everything yourself, by hand, but as you grow it’s necessary to establish systems that help simplify processes.

While you don’t want to automate tasks that could be done better by humans, you do want to eliminate time-consuming repetitive tasks. For example, utilising badging technology that automatically syncs, prints and dispatches event passes to your attendees makes more financial sense than having a team member manually produce them.

Related: Reducing the administrative burden for Oil & Gas UK’s events team

6. Ignoring red flags

Just because things are going well right now, don’t ignore any niggles you have at the back of your mind. Sooner or later these issues could result in a big problem, so you need to deal with them now.

The bigger you get, the more complicated and costly it will get to fix any problems. It’s important that growth is made upon a robust foundation and you should always be thinking about future-proofing your business.

That means if you are operating on out-dated or non-enterprise level computer software or have staff that need additional training for example, it’s time to act. These sorts of issues could hinder your growth and as such are well worth investing in even if they won’t win you new custom or increase your profits in the short-term.

Related: How to unleash your team’s creativity

Conclusion

Fast growth, while exciting, brings challenges. The bigger your business becomes the harder and more complicated things can become. But by being aware of the pitfalls and carefully managing your team you can achieve the long-term success you deserve.