Crash Course When your business is growing so fast it's out of control, here's how to pull the entrepreneurial equivalent of steering into the skid.

You've imagined being successful since you were a littlekid. You've dreamt about it, drooled over it and desired it.But are you ready for success, especially if it drops in all atonce? If you aren't thinking beyond those initial moments ofglory, pucker up and practice saying "Has-been."

See Dick open a dot.com company. See Jane start a hamburgerchain. See the dollars flow into Dick's Internet enterprise.Invest, Dick, invest! See the customers flow into Jane'shamburger chain. Grill, Jane, grill! Watch Dick's stock optionsskyrocket. Watch Jane open restaurants in Boise and Guam in thesame week. See Dick and Jane become suddenly successful--very, veryquickly.

Sometimes, success is easy. It was for Dick and Jane. Theirbooks were an instant success for textbook publishing companyScott, Foresman & Co. (now Addison Wesley Longman Inc.) in1930. And they've enjoyed longevity. By the time the last Dickand Jane story was written, it was 1965, and their books hadreached 85 million boys and girls. The books would continue to besold until 1970 and read beyond that.

Geoff Williams is a reporter for The Cincinnati Postand a frequent contributor to Entrepreneur. Reading aboutDick and Jane as a child obviously affected him.

Not So Fast

Entrepreneurial success can also be easy. It's reacting tothat success that isn't always simple. If you don't reactin the right way, success can overwhelm, control and humiliate you.It can happen to the biggest of companies, like Planet Hollywood,which, after going $250 million in the hole, had to declarebankruptcy and restructure last year. It had expanded too quickly,Robert Earl, the company's CEO and co-founder, told thepress.

Success can also overwhelm even the smallest of companies. Justask Bill Edlebeck of Chicago. The 35-year-old owns The Heritage Bed& Breakfast Registry (think of it as a "front desk"for bed and breakfasts, says Edlebeck); after 12 years of growingat 33 percent a year, the oil started gushing. Because in 1998,Edlebeck did what many entrepreneurs were doing at the time: Heestablished a Web presence (http://www.heritageregistry.com).After allying himself with IBM HomePage Creator, the phone startedringing. And ringing. And ringing.

Edlebeck remembers the turnaround vividly. He had made plans forlunch with a friend one morning, and by the time lunch came around,he couldn't leave. The phone had been ringing steadily allmorning. Usually, he was lucky to receive 10 calls and make one,maybe two, reservations in a day. But about 50 calls had come in,and he'd made five reservations, all before lunch.

The phone kept ringing the next day. And the next. Edlebeck wasrunning the business on his own, and life had been moving along nofaster than the plots of those Dick and Jane books. But now...

"I was afraid of my own office," remembers Edlebeck,who soon realized he wasn't equipped for what was about tohappen: In 1996, The Heritage Bed & Breakfast Registry'ssales were $73,000. In April 1998, everything started to change,and Edlebeck's company made more than $176,000 that year. His1999 figures, estimated at press time, topped $205,000. Sounds goodnow, but back in April 1998, his sudden success was quicklybecoming a nightmare.

"I desperately needed new phone lines, phones, computers, aLAN and a more efficient way of running the office," recallsEdlebeck, who has since hired two employees to help keep up withthe onslaught. "Another glitch was that the sudden jump involume sent up a red flag with our credit card processor. Afteryears of the kind of slow, steady growth characteristic of ahomebased business, they wondered why our volume had jumped and,fearing the worst, stopped making deposits into our account. Theynever told us this, though, so I couldn't figure out why wewere making more money than we ever had and yet had no money in ouraccount to cover the checks that we were paying to hosts."

Edlebeck's crime? Not preparing for the day he would becomevery successful. As an entrepreneur who once went through similarproblems and now delivers seminars on dealing with sudden success,Russ Holdstein, president of Growth Strategies, says, "Thereal problem is when you have a business that hasn't evolved orchanged. To stay successful, you must change to keep growing andadapting."

Success Can Be A Bully

"It took me 20 years to make an overnight success."Eddie Cantor, the vaudevillian, said this in 1963, long after hisred-hot career had cooled. But it could apply to almost anyone whowants to make a name for himself or herself. It took Holdsteinabout four years, and when his overnight success came, it almostdestroyed him.

In 1975, Holdstein started Payday, a then-revolutionary companythat provided payroll services to small businesses out of his SanFrancisco apartment. By 1979, Holdstein's company had swelledto several dozen employees and was pulling in about $4 million. Atthe time, Payday was considered one of the fastest-growingcompanies in the country. But that's when disaster struck.

"We couldn't keep up with the growth and nearlycrashed," Holdstein, now 54, says. "I wound up firing mytwo VPs at the same time--my biggest management mistake. It tooktwo years, and cost me probably $2 million, to correct mymistakes." About the same time the vice presidents were letgo, Holdstein's CFO walked in one day with important news.

"It was the only time in my life when somebody said, `Sitdown, I've got to tell you something,'" recallsHoldstein. The employees at Payday were organizing a union.

It was Holdstein's last chance to turn things around--and herose to the occasion, giving the speech of his life, convincing hisemployees that unionizing wasn't the way to go and bringing hisfirm back from the brink. He sold his company, still successful, afew years ago and now runs Growth Strategies, a Kentfield,California, firm devoted to teaching entrepreneurs the lessonshe's learned:

Lesson No. 1: Stay aware, entrepreneur, stayaware! "I was too busy trying to keep the wheels on.Nobody had any idea what the company was about," saysHoldstein. So he advises that you should include a representativefrom the trenches in your top-level management meetings."Bring in somebody from the mailroom," he says."Talk about your company together. You'll bring in theirperspectives, and it will add a lot of credibility to theprocess."

Lesson No. 2: Strategize, entrepreneur,strategize! "What I find typical," says Holdstein,"is that entrepreneurs are great problem-solvers and great ina crisis, but they aren't very good planners."

Lesson No. 3: Adapt, entrepreneur, adapt! (Hmmm,we're beginning to see why Dick and Jane lost some of theirappeal.) "Most entrepreneurs do what I did," notesHoldstein. "They keep doing what they've been doing untilthey hit a wall, and only then do they make changes."

You need to prepare for a successful future and realize thatwhen it arrives, your company will not operate the way it once did,says Holdstein, adding that he's made it his life's crusadeto help entrepreneurs plan for success. And he seems sincere whenhe says that entrepreneurs can write him at russ@holdstein.com ifthey want advice (and presumably not just a consulting salespitch). And what would some of that advice be? "If you'redoing what you did in the past, then you're going to run intotrouble. You've got to be fundamentally prepared to redesignthe machine while you're experiencing a lot ofgrowth."

And keep watch on the world outside, warns Holdstein. "Alot of entrepreneurs get stuck contemplating their ownnavel--wondering how they can do things faster, easier andcheaper," he says. "But if you're just turning thecrank, trying to be successful, you're going to lose sight ofwhat's going on outside, and you need to have a realunderstanding of the total environment that the company operatesin."

A Southern Success

It was the chicken and dumplings that ultimately gave MarleneWyatt her sudden success. Wyatt's two little boys lovedthem--in fact, they were all the boys wanted to eat. So Wyatt madethem. But the process of creating this edible opus from scratch wasleaving her kitchen a dough- and pastry-covered mess.

Ironically, Wyatt had grown up without a lot of dough--herfamily was poor. Wyatt, now 43, grew up with 11 siblings on a40-acre self-sufficient farm, where the family raised cattle,chickens and hogs and had an extensive garden. They made do, butthey were never rich and they had to work hard. Which might explainwhy Wyatt, instead of buying something to fix her doughy-messproblem, decided to do something about it herself. In the late1980s, Wyatt made what is now called a No Mess Dough Disc, acontraption that allows dough and pastry to be rolled and kneadedwithout sticking to the countertop and making a mess.

Fast-forward a holiday or two to when Syble Whitlock,Wyatt's sister, strolled into Wyatt's kitchen and said,"Where'd you get that?" And minutes later: "Ithink we could sell these things."

In 1990, Wyatt, her two sisters (Whitlock and Pauline Dillard)and her niece, Mona Elliott, began Wood Family Enterprises,dedicated to selling the No Mess Dough Disc. They began selling thedisks at crafts fairs and in local crafts shops, but nobody quittheir day jobs. And then in 1995, Wyatt managed to get her producton the cable shopping channel QVC.

In five and a half minutes, Wyatt sold 2,494 No Mess DoughDiscs--roughly the quantity the partners had previously sold in anentire year. Later that week, she received an order from QVC for6,000 of the disks; an order for 12,000 came soon after that. Andthe orders kept flooding in. Three months later, when Wood FamilyEnterprises was pulling in 20,000 orders per month from QVC, and$67,000 in start-up debts had been paid off, Wyatt dissolved herday-care center to concentrate on selling the Dough Disc. This pastyear, Pyatt, Arkansas-based Wood Family Enterprises' salestopped $2 million. The company now also sells cookbooks and otherculinary items, including gourmet dough mixes.

How does Wood Family Enterprises keep up with its orders? Thecompany assembles and ships its products to its customers, butvendors do their own manufacturing. Wyatt says her main secret forsuccess has been to never accept more orders than the company canfill. "Never agree to do more than you know you're capableof doing," she says. "That will ruin you faster thananything."

In the beginning, Wyatt had half a dozen ideas for what shewanted to sell to the public, but she only introduced one item at atime--"and each time we made profits, we turned a big part ofthose profits into a new product," she says.

It's also important for you to keep things in perspectivewhen the success comes rushing in. "Don't become too fullof yourself," says Wyatt. "I think if I had, I would havebeen knocked down fast."

Conversely, Edlebeck warns not to be insecure when your businesssuddenly takes an upswing. "Success is always something youread about somebody else achieving, and when it happens to you, youmay mistake it for something else, like not being prepared or notknowing enough," says Edlebeck, who plans to take his bed andbreakfast registry to other cities, like New York City and LosAngeles. "It wasn't until I started looking at our growthas the culmination of everything I'd been working for, asopposed to not being ready for all the new business, that I wasable to start moving forward again."

And perhaps the best reward for managing success has nothing todo with money or business. Wyatt enjoys having the financialfreedom to help out her family, such as when she was able to flyfamily members out to visit her ailing mother and when she was ableto offer financial assistance to a seriously ill older sister."That never could have happened without Wood FamilyEnterprises," says Wyatt, who credits her company'ssuccess not to intelligence but to diligent work and a watchful eyefrom above.

What Now?

Sudden success won't just affect your company; it'sbound to affect you. You'll have some questions to answer,sooner rather than later. How many extra hours should you work?What sort of car will you buy with that new wad of cash?

Jeff Kennedy, 41, is the president and CFO of Sight & SoundSoftware, a Portland, Oregon, company that designs Web technologyfor the travel industry. His biggest clients are Wal-Mart andAmerican Airlines. Sight & Sound started in 1994 and made$20,000 that first year. By 1995, Kennedy and his partner, MarkTilden, 44, were bringing in $100,000--not the pot of gold at theend of the rainbow, but Kennedy notes he could start buyinggroceries regularly again. In 1996, American Airlines hired Kennedyand Tilden's company "to devise a disk-based direct-dialproduct that allowed American's customers to make their ownair, car and hotel reservations."

That may be Greek to all of us, but this won't be: In 1996,the partners made about $500,000, a 400 percent jump.

American Airlines liked Sight & Sound's product so much,it asked Kennedy and Tilden to create the booking engine for itsWeb site. "When we heard we had the contract to build thebooking engine for http://www.aa.com, Mark and I just satthere for a minute, stunned," says Kennedy. "We knew itwas huge, that it would change everything. We looked at each otherand grinned. I leaned a little too far back in my surplus officechair and fell over. All I could think about was a good, stiffdrink."

Sight & Sound has since hired 25 employees and hasexperienced an 865 percent growth rate over the past five years,bringing in $4 million this past year. Which, among other things,means Kennedy has had to put off taking a European vacation withhis wife. In fact, he says, "it's very difficult for me tojustify taking more than a week off."

But Kennedy insists that even the busiest and most successfulentrepreneurs need to take care of themselves. So he takes a lot ofthree-day weekends and two-day getaways, even if it's just to aHoliday Inn in downtown Portland.

Sudden success means your own bank account will likely swell,too, notes Rob Elliott, senior executive vice president of BessemerTrust, a New York City wealth management firm. And his company, ofcourse, would only be too happy to help you with your finances. ButElliott makes a good point: "You do have a responsibility tothink very seriously about your wealth and how it will impact you,your spouse, your children and your society." We suggest youthink about that while driving your new Lexus.

Contact Sources

Bessemer Trust, (212) 708-1900, elliot@bessemer.com

Sight & Sound Software, http://www.sight-n-sound.com

Wood Family Enterprises, (800) 456-0851