Growing a business is hard.

Growing a business when you start with no money is harder.

Through the 15 years of PosterBurner, every inch of progress has taken a mountain of effort. 

(If you missed the first part of how we started PosterBurner it's here).

At first I thought I must not be good at this - that it shouldn't be this difficult.

But then I realized that is just how it is when you are a small business.

Progress is hard.

Except sometimes, it isn't.

Sometimes the sky opens, the sea parts, and what used to be impossible is just plain easy.

Sort of like Forest Gump's shrimp boat business.

We had a moment like that in 2020.

The world had just shut down and no one was thinking about posters and canvas prints for their walls.

Business was at a standstill, and our printers and people were idle.

Panic started to set in throughout the office.

But after about a week of being stuck at home, people started thinking about fixing up their house.

And not just a few.  

Everyone was doing home improvement.

And custom prints are one of the most cost effective ways to do home improvement.

Overnight, our volume just exploded.

At first I thought it was just a lucky day.

Then it happened again, and again, and again.

And just like that, PosterBurner doubled in size overnight.

But I was about to realize that with such fast growth comes great costs.

We had just bought an office, so we didn't have much money to buy equipment.

And we couldn't handle the volume with the equipment we did have.

So we were caught between a rock and a hard place.

In the next post, I'll describe what we did after PosterBurner doubled in size and every day became a struggle (which is here).

Rick @ PosterBurner