Pax8 CEO: Simply keeping up with demand is a challenge

Scott Chasin explains the perils of hyper-growth

Simply keeping up with demand is an all-consuming challenge for a firm in hyper-growth mode.

Whilst it’s a problem that many organisations would love to face, Pax8 CEO Scott Chasin explains the downsides to CRN.

Yesterday Chasin covered the opportunities, challenges and potential of AI for businesses, expressing his concern for companies that aren’t leaning into the high-growth technology.

Today Chasin casts his eye over both sides of the hyper-growth coin.

“There’s a duality to hyper-growth, beyond the obvious upside,” Chasin says. “There’s the opportunity it brings, there’s an obvious and tremendous upside to being in this state. But there’s also the other side. To simply keep up with demand is an all-consuming challenge, to the point where you have to build the business to be mostly reactive.

“Within that you sacrifice the pro-active activities to really drive the ‘what’s next’. It’s multi-faceted, you’re not just constrained in terms of keeping up with demand, but your value delivery model is somewhat constrained too, you’re forced into a one-size fits all approach.”

He adds this approach is unavoidable when a growing firm needs to act at a rapidly increasing scale.

“That’s a necessity in terms of scale and building a rinse and repeat strategy. While being a super-grower is advantageous, it will catch up to you. You’ll need to focus on turning the company to being more pro-active, embrace the future and prepare for additional scale.

“That evolution for a lot of companies is really hard. In a lot of cases it’s the turn-around to profitability as well. We’ll see over the next few years a lot of firms that realise the ‘growth at all costs’ model is no longer in vogue and profitability is actually important. Controlling your own destiny is really the battle within when it comes to growing super fast.”

One of the traditional issues with hyper-growth is recruitment, although Chasin explains that it’s a challenge Pax8 is meeting.

“What’s interesting about hyper-growth is you have a carrot that can attract the best talent and we’ve really benefited from that. They’re world class people. It helps that we’re pioneers, we were born out of disruption. When we were incepted, there was no model for a marketplace [for MSPs]. We really pioneered the first cloud commerce marketplace, and that’s a massive carrot [to prospective employees].

“The best talent out there wants to be part of a winning team, everyone wants to win the championship. So it’s partly down to our growth but partly because we’re pioneers, we’re answering demand that others have ignored.”