Growth is generally equated with success for a company. But it doesn't have to be true all the time. Here are my top few reasons why.
Finding suitable talent
While growing rapidly, it is important to realize that the pool of talent is most likely not going to expand at the same rate. Now when there aren't enough suitable people available, It is easy to fall in the trap of lowering expectations from prospective employees just because there aren't enough good people available. (In the hope that the good ones will carry them through) While there is some merit to this argument, it is invariably stretched too far. In such a situation, if a company keeps hiring aggressively, it probably does okay for some period of time (until the lack of good results from these people manifests itself in the results). After that, the customers generally realize that they should be moving on. Maybe this is why some companies which rise meteorically fall at the same rate.
Imbibing the vision
The more the number of people, the harder it is to find people who subscribe to the vision of the company and whole-heartedly feel that they are a part of it. A more aggravated version of this problem is that the company becomes like a machine with many parts which aren't working in synchronization towards achieving a common goal.
Management overhead
This is probably the least of the worries, but cannot be ignored completely either. Many companies fail at effective project management. And if its happening for a company, it can only get worse when as they become larger in size.
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