Here are four strategies that experts recommend for all companies to manage growth safely: Bank proactively. If you're waiting until the last minute for banks to rescue you, you're out of luck. "The thing I tell business leaders is you need to set up those lines of credit when you don't need them," says Martin VanDerSchouw, CEO of business consultancy Looking Glass Development. "Because when you do need them, you need them immediately." Major in chemistry. Hiring star workers is important, but throwing together a bunch of alpha egos is a disaster waiting to happen. "If we had someone who came to our door who might be a decent producer but didn't mesh well, we wouldn't hesitate for a second to say, ‘You know what, it's not working for these reasons,' " says Marv Reineke, co-owner of Pure Marketing Group (asi/302553) in Alpharetta, GA. Take on the hard stuff. Owners and execs will do the things they like to do, but not address the gaping holes that are difficult to plug – like addressing fixed capital costs that aren't in line with revenues or the business plan. Sure, those costs may lead to growth now, but if they're long-term contracts (on a big building lease, for example), they can be hard to get out of if the business starts to lose some its momentum. The best managers of fast-growing companies aren't afraid to make hard decisions on expenses – even when the organization is flying high. Know your place. Each stage of growth isn't the same. Going from zero to $1 million or $2 million is far easier than making the next leap up to $5 or $10 million. Create a business plan at each growth phase, so that the organization overall has a roadmap to follow.

As the economy continues to recover, industry companies are again on a growth track. Fast success, though, can often hamper a company's health. Smaller and medium-size companies can learn how to grow safely from mistakes some of the bigger guys have made.

Success wasn't an accident, Bruce Wimmer thought at the time. Jensen Beach Marketing (asi/234720) was going places, thanks to a ripe economy, aggressive marketing, pinpoint targeting of clients in government and the hiring of capable salespeople. Started in 2000, Wimmer's company was growing steadily at around 20% a year; by 2006, Jensen's success spiked enough to rank it as the fifth fastest-growing distributor in the industry. "Basically we were in the right place at the right time at that point," Wimmer says.

Wimmer, however, couldn't tell that the light of success was an oncoming train. His municipal clients slashed their budget as the economy's woes descended like a black cloud over their Florida beach town. Having expanded rapidly and borrowed too much, the president of Jensen was left reeling. "There was a lot of free money flowing back years ago, a lot of easy money to get, a lot of business loans you could get," he says. "Now we're in a stage where we're paying everything back that we had borrowed years ago."

After layoffs and other cost cuts, Jensen's revenues had fallen 50% from its best years. Honest and forthright about the company's trials since those days, Wimmer espouses a practical outlook: the need to diversify his client base and become more proactive in identifying customers. "We'd like to grow again, but we're going to do it a lot more slowly," he says.

The rags-to-riches tale holds a special place in folklore, but it's the next chapter, the riches-to-rags postscript, that's nearly as commonplace. When giants come crashing down, it's often from the sum total of errors made during their greatest spurts of growth, when everything is changing so quickly. Most importantly, such instances are timeless; they transcend the typical eras of failure like the dot-com bust or the most recent recession.

In this industry, you don't need to look far to witness such occurrences. Promopeddler.com (asi/300367) soared in the online marketplace, notching 865% growth in a three-year period and ranking on the Inc. 500 list for America's fastest-growing private companies. Yet by April of last year, company co-founders Monte Baumgartner and Lewis Amicone were looking to sell or merge the company after sales fell by more than half. The company was later bought by Branders.com (asi/145021) and CEO Jerry McLaughlin.

And, then there's the spectacular flameout of CorpLogoWare. One of the fastest-growing firms in the industry in 2007, CorpLogoWare ran up over $25 million in debt and was out of business by the spring of 2008. "I pressed too far too fast, and I'm to blame for that," CEO Jack Levine said at the time.

At the height of its growth, CorpLogoWare carried 130 account executives and went through nearly double that amount to get there. For Marv Reineke, whose company Pure Marketing Group (asi/302553) in Alpharetta, GA, had 195% growth between 2007 and 2009, it was a firsthand lesson in the evils of excess. "It was growing so fast and the turnover was so high," remembers the former CorpLogoWare exec. "We almost had a rule where you didn't ask somebody their name for the first 30 days. You didn't know how long they would be there." The same could be said of businesses that burn too brightly without fundamental safeguards in place.

The five biggest mistakes that growing businesses make are: not having a plan, ignoring the finances, accepting any deal – big or small, doing everything yourself, and taking on exorbitant expenses.