Published on the Forbes.com on 10/9/2018

Over the course of my career (so far), I’ve had the opportunity to work for a number of different companies in various phases of their life cycles. While I’ve been a part of several relatively large companies (with thousands of employees), the majority of my experience has been with organizations going through their startup-to-growth phase.

Along the way, I’ve worked with three companies that demonstrated exceptionally fast growth and earned spots on the Inc. 5000 list at least once, including OPTIZMO Technologies, my current company. To provide a bit more context, each of these three companies was positioned in the digital marketing industry. Two provided marketing tech or ad tech solutions to the industry, and the third is involved in a wide variety of areas, including affiliate, email and mobile marketing, as well as domain registration and domain parking. While every company is unique, there are a number of common threads that wind their ways through these organizations, impacting their fast growth.

The digital marketing space is no stranger to fast-growing startups, as it tends to be a highly entrepreneurial industry. Below are my takeaways and advice based on how these companies addressed three typical growth challenges. For consistency, I’ll use past tense to describe how each company dealt with these challenges.

Headcount Growth

As companies start to scale, one of the biggest challenges they face is adding people to the team. Each of the three companies dealt with the issue of balancing increasing headcount with increased business volume. There are plenty of lessons learned from companies that added team members too fast, getting out ahead of business growth, only to then scale back when new business failed to materialize…

Read the rest on Forbes.com.