Scaling your business presents exciting opportunities, but you need to do it carefully to avoid burning up resources and crushing employee morale. Here are four lessons on scaling that I learned the hard way.

(Source:builtin)

Rapid growth in a startup or small business is both exciting and daunting. Your team’s ability to bring a bit of order to the chaos can be the difference between flaming out or effectively scaling to become a household name. You will face decisions about whether to build, borrow, or buy your way to the next level. If your organization is like my last company, then you want to remain laser-focused on your customers and delivering them a high-quality product or service. That’s why we decided to buy off-the-shelf products to meet the needs of our back office, and we ended up learning a lot of lessons along the way.

I spent two years sifting through white papers and product demos for just about every HR and finance SaaS tool marketed to early stage startups. We were disrupting the laundry and dry cleaning industry through a convenient pick-up and delivery service. We had raised several rounds of venture investment, launched several markets, and scaled our team to over 120 people. Our rapidly growing headcount and geographic expansion pushed our beginner-level, “startup friendly” tools to their limits, and it was soon time for us to professionalize our HR and finance systems.