A two or three year wait time.... isn't anything close to a sustainable business model in the long term.
They have a hot product, and.....this is the point in business where you go seek outside investors to ramp up your production to a point where your capacity meets your products ongoing demand.
Doing what they're doing now will inspire dozens more "imitators" (as it already has), many of whom will take business away, .....which will reduce the desirability of the GFC to a point where rather than see their business grow, they'll see it diminish.
The GFC is a super-hot overland item right now ... and GFC needs to seriously strike while the iron is hot!
Those are some thoughtful and otherwise reasonable comments, but as a retired university College of Business professor, I will offer another point of view.
Growth strategy for any business, but especially for a newer one, has to be planned to occur in a sustainable manner.
The huge delay between the time it takes to raise additional investment money, build expensive new facilities and then finally ramp up your production levels, will also often allow competitors of a hot product like GFC’s to enter into the market and steal away one’s market share....similar to the comment above about imitators taking away market share because you cannot produce fast enough to meet your backed up orders.
Even though, as pointed out above, the potential market for GFC and similar shells may be enormous, it’s extremely risky for a newer, growing business to rely on hypothetical, expanded sales projections as the sole basis for taking on huge, burdensome new debt levels for the construction of new production facilities.
Too often, by the time the new company has finally completed its new facilities, the wave of product popularity has already crashed upon the rocky shore and ebbed back into the fickle sea...leaving that company now struggling mightily to try to cover its current, higher debt obligations while sadly also watching its sales figures drop and fail to keep up with its new, much higher overhead costs.
The result then:
Possibility of bankruptcy for the once promising business.
(See XP Campers as a perhaps similar type of situation)
So, you see, it’s just not that easy or safe for a smaller company to speedily, economically, sustainably ramp up production when the sudden explosion of popularity of a new product seems to otherwise mandate that path.
(Class Dismissed! ?)
