(Contributed by Gordon Daugherty, Capital Factory President)

Experiencing rapid growth is different from having scalability.  Growth is an aspiration or end result while scalability is a capability that may or may not get exercised.  Growth can come in spurts and is most commonly thought of in terms of sales and marketing attributes.  Scalability is architected in and is commonly reflected in the “back office” or the technical architecture of the product solution.  In other words, not the sexy stuff but rather the “plumbing”.

It’s true that having genuine scalability can dramatically affect how your company is able to handle sustained periods of growth.  In fact, this is probably the right way to think about scalability – what is needed so that we can fully exploit sustained periods of growth with minimal risk and disruption to our company?  Going into an “all hands on deck” mode is one way of getting through periods of excessive growth but it comes at a cost of disrupting all sorts of things that are surely strategic and you can’t live in this mode for very long.

Read the full blog post here.