Rapid expansion is a fond dream for most startups and even established companies. It indicates a massive surge in sales, revenue, and engagement. And it’s a signal from the market that a business has landed on something incredible. Companies that successfully ride a surge emerge triumphant in the market, while companies that don’t get left behind.

The Harvard Business Review first coined the term “hypergrowth” in 2008, defining it as a point “where the winners get sorted from the losers.” To come out on the winning side, you need to fully understand hypergrowth — not just how to achieve it, but how to maintain it and manage the turbulence it creates.

Let’s explore how to optimize rapid scaling by examining the successful strategies of high-growth companies.

What does hypergrowth look like?

According to the World Economic Forum, a company achieves hypergrowth when they reach a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of at least 20–40% for over a year. During this time, the company is continuously selling products, increasing their revenue, and gaining significant momentum in a new market. But it must also expand quickly, which leads to skyrocketing costs for resources. This is a time of rapid change, and it can propel a company into seemingly instant success — if managed correctly.

Specific characteristics distinguish a successful hypergrowth company from competitors. Here are some common attributes of businesses that achieve rapid expansion.

Inspiring products and services

To enter the exclusive echelon of hypergrowth companies, you need a strong brand that galvanizes your customers to be just as passionate about your product as you are. You already know your product can change the world. The question is: How do you inspire your customers to feel the same way?

Take time to identify your target audience, understand your user personas, test ideas with real customers, and iterate. Continuously hone your brand image and products until you produce something that inspires you and your employees, which translates to your customers and encourages a positive public perception.

Knowledge of what works

Hypergrowth companies understand that failure is almost as important as success. They track every piece of data to discover what works and what doesn’t to help them make informed decisions for adaptation and future initiatives.

If their marketing fails to achieve appreciable results, they try a new strategy. And if customers aren’t engaging consistently, they gather feedback and find new ways to satisfy their audience. These companies are always looking for new opportunities to improve and are ready to pivot away from a strategy that isn’t working.

Valued employees

It takes a cohesive team of qualified, motivated professionals to bring out the best in your brand. You’ll only achieve that precious synergy by developing a healthy company culture. Hypergrowth companies accomplish this by incentivizing their employees to bring their best selves to every project and encouraging them to share ideas in an open, stress-free environment.

5 hypergrowth strategies for companies on the rise

The fastest-growing companies use a wide variety of well-known strategies to manage hypergrowth. These growth strategies help them pivot quickly to create and respond to new market conditions.

Here are five primary approaches to achieving successful rapid expansion.

1. Customer centricity

Customers can distinguish between brands that value their experience and those that don’t. As a result, expanding companies tend to take on high-impact customer acquisition strategies early. They find meaningful ways to please their customers and provide real value and solutions to their problems.

A great example of a customer-centric company is Stripe, whose payment processing infrastructure has revolutionized how businesses, large and small, accept transactions online or in person. They began in 2010, and a decade later, their valuation is in the billions.

Stripe’s success stems from their focus on delivering a high-quality experience for their customers that’s built on a product that prioritizes the end user’s needs. In this way, they’ve nurtured a strong base of businesses who trust them to provide a professional, trustworthy service.

2. Agility

Remaining agile is crucial for the success of every hypergrowth company, and particularly for hypergrowth startups. Your business must respond to market trends rapidly, scale swiftly, and pivot as necessary to ensure your product finds a precise fit in the market.

The appropriately named Agile methodology is an excellent framework for shaping your business operations. Agile workflows break work up into manageable chunks of time called sprints. These time frames can be anywhere from a week to a month long, but two-week sprints are most common. At the end of every sprint, the team has a frank discussion about their success in achieving their goals for that sprint. Then, they devise new plans for how to get the most out of the next one.

3. Scalable business systems

It’s vital that your organization stays ready to scale quickly if you want it to keep up with exponential growth. Your business model, team culture, and company structure must be designed to climb a steep growth curve without losing ground.

Keep scalability in mind with every decision you make about your company. Whether selecting suppliers, hiring talent, or building infrastructure, you must always opt for strategies that can expand rapidly according to growth.

4. Disruptive technology

Companies that experience hypergrowth usually have a distinctly disruptive product that shifts the market or changes the industry landscape permanently. If your product is positioned to change how customers interact with other services they use, you’re on the right track.

Take Zapier as an example. It’s an app that enables other apps to exchange information and then automates those interactions. With Zapier, clients can generate leads on Facebook, import them to Salesforce, and reach out to them through Mailchimp. Zapier filled a need and, in the process, became profitable in 2016, just four years after launch.

5. High employee retention

Building a strong culture of appreciation, cooperation, and mutual respect is an excellent way to maintain your company’s momentum during hypergrowth. When employees are rewarded for their hard work as the company succeeds, they’re incentivized to deliver a worthwhile product. Retaining your staff also means you’ll spend considerably less time backfilling roles and training new hires.

How to efficiently manage a hypergrowth company

Gracefully managing an organization in hypergrowth is an incredible achievement. Few companies successfully push through such a time and truly maximize their gains, but it’s possible. Here are some management tips that have worked well for businesses like Zapier, Stripe, and Zoom.

Operate strategy first

Your business must have a comprehensive strategy for maintaining smooth operations during hypergrowth. Take the time to create detailed road maps, identify important key performance indicators (KPIs), and codify your product’s lifecycle. These strategies will help you stay on track as you adapt to changing market conditions.

Don’t cut corners

Avoid taking shortcuts when there’s a more thorough way to solve a problem permanently. This is especially true for taking on tech debt, which you should avoid at all costs. A cheaper or easier solution may seem appropriate now, but it won’t necessarily help you in the long run when you have a massive influx of customers and must scale quickly.

Hire passionate professionals

When assessing candidates, look for people with a palpable passion for excellence. You want employees who are excited to join your company on its journey to success, not just people whose resumes tick the right boxes. Remember that you need team members who can help you scale your culture, not just your business.

Delegate

No matter how much effort you put into hiring the right people, building the right culture, and crafting the right strategies, you won’t succeed if employees can’t work autonomously.

Don’t micromanage. Instead, trust the team to follow your established standards and strategies and evolve them organically. Let managers manage, and listen to them when they tell you a change is needed. Effectively delegating responsibilities will help your company flex and adapt as it encounters the unknown.

Hypergrowth challenges

Your company will face many challenges during hypergrowth, some expected and others novel, but you must take them all head-on. Try to avoid decision paralysis, and instead problem-solve creatively but quickly.

Here are some common challenges you can anticipate ahead of time and avoid by forming action plans to implement when they arise.

Extreme focus on hypergrowth

It’s easy to fall into the trap of using a small handful of metrics to determine your readiness for hypergrowth. Instead, focus on increasing sales and top-line revenue, but remember that hypergrowth emerges from doing many disparate things right — it doesn’t occur in a vacuum.

If you spend extra time or money on needed assets, your progress might plateau initially, but you’ll see the benefits down the line. Occasionally, take a step back and examine how each decision serves the larger goal.

Overworked staff

Your employees must be aware that the company is driving for hypergrowth, so communicate that early on. But it’s equally important to avoid causing burnout. You might initially save money by saddling a single developer with a huge workload, but you’ll be worse off if they leave and you need to find two people to replace them.

Skyrocketing costs

As your company ramps up into a hypergrowth stage, the cost of maintaining operations will increase dramatically. This is especially pronounced in marketing budgets and infrastructure expenses, which cost significantly more as they scale up. It’s essential to budget for growth in advance. Secure funding early and often so when it’s time to spend big, you’ll be ready.

Successful growth with Webflow

Now that you understand the ins and outs of hypergrowth, equip yourself with the tools to handle it. There are many fantastic resources that’ll help your company scale rapidly, and it’s crucial to find the right solutions early — before you need them — so they’re in place when the time comes.

Webflow Enterprise is here to help you scale confidently. Our web development tools automatically adjust to increased traffic, growing content, and performance progress, and our security features are robust and reliable. 

With Webflow, your team can collaborate to create visually stunning websites that optimize the user experience without writing a single line of code. Our platforms are tailor-made for companies that need to build and manage sites collaboratively at scale.