According to the article “When Your Business Takes Off: Tips for Fast Growing Company” by contributor Eyal Lifshitz on www.business2community.com, like any startup, your new business could plod along for a few years, and then all of the sudden, you have an influx of customers, demand and revenue. With your business growing so quickly, you’ll need to plan for new ways of operating. As such, Lifshitz offers a few tips:

• Hire more staff. In the beginning, a few key people probably took care of multiple facets of the organization in addition to daily duties — marketing, accounting and so on. However, rapid growth means that you need to take hiring seriously. But, understanding the balance between hiring too many or too little workers to keep up with your pace of growth can be difficult. To help with this balancing act, you need to both understand your business and your market as well as concentrate on specific functions, such as marketing, finance and customer support.

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• Change your corporate structure. If you started out as a sole proprietorship or a general partnership, you may need to consider becoming an LLC or corporation, taking into account taxes, liability, intellectual property and contracts. While these legal matters can be tedious, they are also very important and should not be overlooked.
• Reconsider your finances. As a consumer, debt is something that people try to avoid. However, entrepreneurs, when managing it wisely, use debt as a tool. When your business is growing rapidly, debt can help you take on more customers or expand. Consider opening business lines of credit or getting a loan. Alternatively, you could raise capital through investors in the form of equity, but that will cut away at your percentage of ownership. Debt financing, when managed properly, can help you grow your business without giving parts of it away.

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• Create a long-term plan. When you start a business, you tend to think short-term: the next day, the next week, the next month. But when your business is growing fast, you need a strategic game plan to manage that growth. Are you going to expand? Will you offer a new service or product? How can you keep ahead of the competition? Your long-term plan will change as the market does due to new competition, trends and technologies, but right now, you have momentum, and you need to plot out where that momentum is going to take you.

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