Growing Pains: An Analysis of High Growth Companies and the Attributes that Influence Their Continued Growth

Nearly every company executive strives to achieve rapid growth and expansion for their firm, and does so in an almost single-minded manner. This paper focuses on the seldom discussed or accounted for negative side of rapid growth, namely the growing pains experienced by companies as their larger size creates a variety of challenges, such as increased bureaucracy, financial management, and maintaining efficiency. Specifically, this paper began with the Forbes 100 Fastest-Growing Corporations in 2011 and created a dataset of their corporate information over the five-year period after their recognition (2011-2015). The dataset was analyzed in order to identify the negative factors that those companies experienced due to their rapid growth. The goal of this was provide a roadmap for expansion-minded companies to strategize about their future growth