It seems like a dream scenario for a startup: Sales surge, and business takes off.  Any number of things can turn a small business into a rapid success—from a TV appearance to great connections at a trade show to a viral online video—but sustaining that success forces an entrepreneur to make tough choices. For instance: Should the company immediately ramp up production and risk lowering product quality? Bring in more workers to help an overstressed staff, and risk destroying company culture? Try to live off the original innovation, or plow lots of cash into R&D to develop new ones that might not pan out?  Here’s a closer look at some of these big questions entrepreneurs face when they get successful quickly, with advice from those who have been there.  It’s the immediate problem a company must deal with when it hits the big time quickly. All of its systems are set up to handle a certain level of production and sales. And suddenly it is swamped with orders.  Back in 2011, she was making steady progress with CitiKitty, a toilet-training kit for cats. The business was bringing in up to about $260,000 in annual revenue, and was moving around 600 units a month.  Then she landed a spot on “Shark Tank.”  Within hours of her appearance on the entrepreneurial reality show, Ms. Rescate says, she had a backlog of more than 10,000 orders “that crippled my infrastructure.”  Her voice mail filled up that first night, and her phone was ringing continuously for days, as curious customers tried to learn more about her product. More seriously, she ran out of stock—she had just 2,000 items available—that first night, and it would take a month for her production facility to catch up with demand at their normal pace of production.  Overwhelmed, she spent the next day roaming a local mall to get her head together. Finally, she realized she couldn’t afford to waste time taking a breath. She remembers thinking, “I shouldn’t be here. What am I going to do?”  She shouldn’t have been in that position in the first place. The best time to ask that question, experts say, is at the very start of a business. Entrepreneurs should realize they may have to ramp up fast, and make deals with their manufacturing facility that let them temporarily boost production on short notice for a reasonable price.  But most businesses don’t take those steps, so they end up scrambling to find ways to balance competing interests.  Businesses, for instance, can simply keep up their current levels of production and make customers wait. But that carries risks, says Stewart Thornhill, executive director of the University of Michigan’s Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies. Long delays can lead to bad word-of-mouth about a product, killing its momentum. So if a company takes that route, he says, it must be prepared to engage with unhappy customers and be upfront about delays and mistakes along the way.  On the other hand, companies can try to fill orders as fast as possible by finding a low-cost facility to rush out the order. But “if you get ‘fast and cheap,’ ‘good’ is probably going to suffer,” Mr. Thornhill warns.  So, a drop in quality might also bring bad word-of-mouth and faltering sales. And the company could end up stuck with excess inventory or trapped in a long-term production deal without sales to back it up.  Ms. Rescate, for her part, took the former path. She took about a month to fill her orders. She emailed every customer to let them know exactly when their order would ship and to thank them for their patience and support.  “If you keep people informed of their order status they are happier, regardless of [whether] it’s delayed,” she says. What’s more, “most people who order when they see a major mention on national TV expect that their order will be delayed.”  After clearing the backlog, she negotiated a deal to have her existing manufacturer ramp up production capacity for a price she was happy with, and CitiKitty went on to earn more than $1 million in revenue that year.  Demand for the product slowed—it brought in about $700,000 in revenue last year—but Ms. Rescate later developed the HoodiePillow, which adds a neck-supporting cushion to the back of a hoodie. The product also landed on “Shark Tank” and became a quick success. Last year, it brought in about $600,000 in sales.  Of course, filling a sudden rush of orders means a lot of extra work, and a lot of questions.  For instance: What’s the best way to bring in more workers so that you’re not loaded with overhead if demand dies down?  When Ms. Rescate was handling her burst of success, she needed help to assemble units and get them out the door. But she made sure to hire seasonal workers, so that she didn't have to cover their salaries once demand died down. Now she has four part-time employees at CitiKitty—whose hours can be ramped up if orders pour in—and contractors for accounting, graphic design and Web development.  “This part-time structure enables CitiKitty to remain nimble and instantly scalable to handle peaks in demand such as ‘Shark Tank’ repeats and holiday demand,” she says.  For businesses that can’t get by with temporary workers—those that need skilled labor to handle long-term projects, for instance—experts advise that founders or trusted early employees stay involved in the hiring process for quality control.  As a company grows, it’s “very difficult for them to maintain that culture,” warns Bruce Bachenheimer, a management professor and executive director of the Entrepreneurship Lab at Pace University.  Ryan Holmes, founder of Hootsuite, which lets companies manage and measure all of their social-media accounts in one place, saw his business boom to 100,000 users in just six months and one million in just a year as social media grew in popularity. That meant employees were forced to wear multiple hats, and sorely needed help.  But hiring took a long time. “We look for culture fit,” Mr. Holmes says. Back then, “I told people candidly, if they were looking for top dollar they’d probably get it at [big Canadian telecom firms] or a bank or wherever else. This wasn’t really the place for them and that if that was their prime motivator, then we’d probably not be the best place.”  Mr. Holmes took on the task of interviewing everyone in the workforce as it doubled to 20 employees in 2010 then continued to grow to about 45 people in 2011. Eventually, it grew to be such a responsibility that he realized he’d have to spend all of his job on hiring—so he turned to his executive assistant.  “I got comfortable with her thinking, and eventually we were always on the same page,” says Mr. Holmes, who eventually had her lead Hootsuite’s talent department.  Competitors swoop in fast when they see a hot product. So, businesses can’t sit still—they must constantly be looking for new markets and new products to maintain momentum. Often, that means plowing a lot more money into R&D, and accepting that not every new idea is going to be as successful as the first one.  A little more than a decade ago, Ellen and Michael Diamant bet $40,000 on an idea: Skip Hop, a stylish $50 diaper bag. The money was enough to get them 400 boxes of product—cranked out by a messenger bag and backpack maker in El Salvador—which they took to neighborhood retailers and a trade show.  Within about half a year, their first order was sold out and they had recouped their initial investment. By the end of the year, they had around $250,000 in sales—but soon copycat diaper bags began moving into their space.  Fortunately, it was something the pair had anticipated, and they started brainstorming quickly. “A few companies in our business are folding because they’re not diversified,” says Ms. Diamant. “We wanted to shake up the marketplace, so we added some accessories.”  But there was a steep learning curve. One product they concocted, a whale-shaped bathtub-spout cover, didn’t catch on with buyers at first. “We didn’t realize how the [retail] channels worked,” Mr. Diamant says. “When we first brought it out, the retailers liked it but didn’t want to buy it. In brick-and-mortar channels they don’t want a single innovation. They want a section of products around a solution. It was a learning experience.”  Ms. Diamant adds, “We didn’t think too much of things that would go together and wanted to go with things that were really cool. We wanted to see the design impact we wanted to make without being too vested in what retailers wanted.”  The focus on looking cool also led them to pour $50,000 in design and tooling costs into a plastic spice-rack-like holder for baby-food jars. But it flopped.  Now the company, which Mr. Diamant says tops $100 million in annual revenue, tries to have a range of ideas in the pipeline at all times. The rule of thumb: Four out of every 10 new products they release fail, while three are average sellers. But the remaining three out of 10 tend to be home runs.  “The hits,” says Ms. Diamant, “make up for the misses.”  Mr. Parmar is a writer in Canada. He can be reached at reports@wsj.com.
An appearance on “Shark Tank” or a positive review can swamp a small business with orders. Here’s how to manage the rush.