Overnight Growth, Not So Great

Many of us have bought it thinking we might hit it big overnight, and while some of the people who have bought lottery tickets have won the big check, most do not win anything. I’m over my lottery ticket buying days. Most people consider a lottery ticket the key to overnight growth and success. While I believe that overnight growth can be very-well possible, in most cases, it is not probable. I am going to give a couple examples of how overnight growth can be a short-term gain, but a long-term damage.

- The first example is about the fast food restaurant industry. – Say you are the owner of a sub shop that just had its grand opening and everything is going smooth for the next 6 months. After the six months have passed, you have probably got a grip on inventory control, staffing the proper amount of employees throughout the day and so on. All of a sudden, out of the blue, your sub shop is mentioned, on a TV interview, to be a celebrity’s favorite place to eat lunch. The next day you see the day opens up like normal, but when lunch rolls around, chaos occurs, and you find yourself understaffed, running out of products, and busier than the highways during rush hour. Now, most may say, that this is only a problem for the duration of the hype that the celebrity has created, but if you look into further detail, you will notice that while you might have made more profit than you made in the whole week, during that time where everyone flooded your sub shop for lunch, I see the long term damage. Your staff rushed through service, so some people might have gotten the impression that your shop lacks the phenomenal service it always has in reality, causing those people not to come back in the future, leading you to lose out on long-term sales. Running out of product very-well might be another issue, because this will lead you to display that your restaurant is not properly stocked for the amount of traffic it drives and since you had to turn people back, they have lost out on their lunch hour’s precious time, so they will more than likely not give your shop another shot for lunch.

- An example in the online world, of overnight-growth causing more long-run damage, would be when your website receives a tremendous amount of traffic in one day, than it has ever received in a lifetime! While it is a great thing to have 1,000,000 visits in a day, it is not so great when you were unprepared for it. In most cases, if your site is hosted by a third party host, your site may have been taken offline or the traffic would have been allowed and you would be facing overage charges in bandwidth. Both cases would hurt your site’s image because if it went offline, people would be more likely not to visit it again and if you got overage charges, you might have a tough time paying the bill. If your traffic grew gradually, over time, from say 20,000 visits a day to 60,000 to 150,000 and so on you would have been more likely to be prepared for it.

To conclude, I would like to mention, that in addition to be prepared for extremes, you should consider the long-term path to success, because you are probably more likely to benefit more from it. There are always exceptions to the examples above, such as having a sub shop being mentioned in the 10 best places to eat, which just might bring lost customers back. Or with a website, you might get traffic and attention from others among the web for having such growth overnight and make up for the time when it went down or the overage in hosting fees. Just remember, in business, you should think of the ripple effect and your company’s overall image.