Foreign Perspectives

Whilst we’re all looking for rapid growth in our businesses, if that rapid growth happens to arrive unexpectedly it can cause equally unexpected problems.

Moving from being a small scale business to a medium sized one in any market is usually a very big move. On the small scale, it’s quite possible to operate very much as a cottage industry in many fields with the owner doing a lot of the work themselves. As the scale moves up though a point arrives where automation in some form is a necessity and that’s where many businesses fall down through not having prepared for it.

I say automation but, of course, another option is to take on staff. In the “real world” it’s additional staff that is usually the way to go but online automation is often the preferred route although not necessarily the easiest one. In fact, often automation is essential online simply because growth can be very, very rapid and so much so that taking on additional staff may not be a viable option. Sure you can hire staff if you find that you now have two or three times the number of customers that you had last year, but if it’s 10 times the number of customers you had a couple of months ago then it’s a different matter.

Fortunately, the Internet provides the tools to let you scale up your offering without major hassles. Ten times the number of customers online isn’t the problem that it would be in the real world. If you’ve used standard software then chances are you may well get away with simply upgrading the hosting package for your website as the number of customers grows.

What’s dangerous is to take it for granted that you can simply upgrade in that way forever though. There are upper limits that shared hosting packages offer before you need to move onto VPS hosting or even a dedicated server and in some cases those upgrades may mean you looking to hire an IT expert to support it all for you.