Many startups are focused on achieving massive growth in record time. But new companies aren’t the only ones that go through explosive growth — older businesses can often hit an inflection point where growth goes through the roof.
We talked to three Chicago companies that saw periods of rapid growth, enabling positive changes but also presenting challenges to overcome.
Jellyvision has held that learning is better when the learner is engaged. But by changing what it helped people learn, Jellyvision was able to tap into a huge growth market. After pivoting toward solving corporate communications challenges, hiring picked up. According to senior vice president of people Mary Beth Wynn, hiring doubled yearly from 2011 to 2014.
“The challenges with such growth? Having enough management and infrastructure support for all those new people,” she said. “In some departments, we hired individual contributors faster than we hired or promoted managers, so many managers ended up with teams so large that managing them was a challenge.”
The pictures above shows the company's annual "Mustache Day," the top one was taken in 2011 and the bottom one is from earlier this year. The logistics of bringing on that many people posed a problem of its own.
“We also have very mundane, practical issues like not having enough bathrooms for the number of folks working in our office, not enough space for all-hands meetings— not enough space, period,” Wynn said.
As any company grows, its culture gets strained. But for Jellyvision, it kept a close watch on how hiring and other changes were altering its unique culture, always sure to keep things aligned with the atmosphere that had provided such growth.
“We put lots of time and energy into our recruiting to ensure that everyone who joins us is smart, humble, honest, kind, self-motivated and self-managed — and then we treat these amazing people with trust and respect once they get here,” Wynn said. “That approach persists whether we hire 20 or 120 people in a year — and I think it’s key to our success.”
Veritas Health, founded in 1999, saw huge growth in 2014, when its Spine-health.com property saw 80 percent growth year-over-year, a sharp increase from the 20 percent growth it had seen previously.
Jeff Davis, business development manager at Veritas, said a combination of SEO improvements, UI and UX changes, and improved back-end technology came together to drive 2014’s massive uptick in traffic. The company has seen continued growth since then, along with a swift increase in ad revenue thanks to better usability.
“The rapid rise in revenue allowed us to staff across the board to fill critical roles within our organization and invest heavily in content creation — which of course is the fuel we need for future growth across all of our web publications,” Davis said.
But continuing that growth across other properties presented a bit of a challenge initially, as did replicating the improvement across its portfolio of health sites. It also had to figure out how to turn increased revenue into effective growth across the company.
“There is always the challenge of staying entrepreneurial and nimble as we try to grow,” Davis said. “Implementing efficient workflows and other processes to support continued and sustained growth is essential.”
As companies get older, they often expand their product lineup to help draw in new customers and keep up with changes in their industry. At LiveWatch Security, a complex variety of offerings that had steadily grown since its 2002 founding stifled further growth.
“At one point we offered over 100,000 products on our website,” said LiveWatch CEO Brad Morehead. “Simplifying the product line to a place where we only had two main product lines allowed us to focus all of our energy on being great at marketing those product lines. Complexity is the enemy of small business.”
Of course, cutting back product lines also meant initial cuts to revenue. But after focusing the company’s output, growth picked up and some the efficiency learned in the period of low cash flow helped accelerate growth once teams realigned.
“Growth creates opportunity; we can hire more people, promote our best people, and add infrastructure to make the jobs better and more efficient for our team,” Morehead said.
Images via featured companies
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