A few years ago I started working with a company that had grown fast. Really fast. Revenue had more than quadrupled in a short window, and from the outside it looked like a straight-up success story.
When I got in there, though, what I found was a business that had essentially outrun itself. The financial systems were behind. Internal controls weren’t being followed. There were compliance gaps. The person sitting in the CFO seat had grown into the role organically over many years, which is a kind way of saying they’d never actually operated at this scale before and were doing their best with tools that weren’t built for it.
None of that was caused by the growth. The problems were already there. The growth just made them impossible to paper over anymore.
I think about this through the lens of endurance racing a lot, because the parallel is almost exact. You can hide poor preparation in a short race. You can gut it out on adrenaline, coast on fitness you built months ago, compensate for a thin training block with sheer willpower. But a long race exposes everything. If your nutrition plan isn’t dialed in, you’ll find out around mile 60 on the bike. If you skipped too many long runs, your legs will tell you around mile 8 of the run. You can’t fake it at distance.
Rapid business growth works the same way. At a smaller scale, gaps are manageable and easy to absorb. Scale up fast, and suddenly the accounting setup that worked fine at $5 million is a liability at $25 million. The informal processes that everyone understood start breaking down as the team grows. The inefficiencies that seemed minor become real operational failures.
I’ve watched this happen more than once, and the part that’s always painful is that the growth itself was genuinely good. The business earned it. The market responded. The product worked. The back office just couldn’t keep up.
So what do you actually do about it? A few things I’d tell any founder heading into a meaningful growth phase:
Get the right financial person in place before you need them. The time to think about your CFO or fractional CFO situation isn’t when the wheels are coming off. It’s when things still look fine but you can feel the complexity starting to outpace your current setup. If the person managing your finances has never operated at the scale you’re heading toward, that’s worth taking seriously now rather than later.
Stress-test your systems before the volume does it for you. Ask honestly: if our revenue doubled next year, would our accounting, payroll, reporting, and internal controls actually handle it? If the answer is anything other than a clear yes, that’s your roadmap.
Do the pre-race course study. Before a big Ironman, I spend time on the terrain. Where are the hills? What could the weather do? What’s my contingency if something goes wrong on the bike? Founders heading into a growth sprint should do the same kind of pre-mortem on their business. Where are the vulnerabilities? What breaks first? Who would we need that we don’t have yet?
The company I mentioned is in a much better place now. The right people are in the right seats, the reporting is clean, and the compliance issues are resolved. But it cost them time, money, and a level of stress that wasn’t necessary. They earned the growth. They just didn’t prepare the infrastructure for it.
The finish line is a lot more enjoyable when you actually trained for the race.
