@npiters expansion with out stressing the business. Death by overheads!
I was reading about a company that went in to administration recently. They had done well during the pandemic, growing their business 8x its pre-pandemic size and was particularly cash rich at this point, they invested heavily in their digital marketing team to continue this post-pandemic, but digital growth stabilized as consumers returned to stores, the increased over heads meant they went chasing business via traditional channels wholesale. They won business but their manufacturing capacity was not sufficient to meet demand, so they moved in to a new production facility... more cost, and more interestingly their production and business management systems were not geared to cope with the volumes. Now throw in the Ukrainian war and cost of living and all of a sudden the banks, tax authorities are after their money, investors stop investing in the business and the cash dries up, then you don't have the funds to support pre-season production spike and poof you go bust!
Hindsight is wonderful, but the crunch point was the expectation that the exceptional times of a pandemic would continue. The additional over head stressed the business and a cascade of events causing the demise of a previously solid business.
