A Chat With Paal Gisholt, President/CEO, SmartPak Equine

CS: What is your current biggest business challenge?
PG: Our biggest challenge, now that we’ve improved our profitability, is continuing to maintain our very high rate of growth. I think that’s almost every business’s challenge. From last year to this year, we’ve grown about 60 percent. That creates a set of challenges in terms of managing the operations and making sure we don’t run out of space. But maintaining that momentum also is very challenging. We find that doing more of the same is a really important thing. We’ve only been cataloging for three years; we’re getting much better at that. We have a pretty substantial Web presence, but we can keep improving in that area. But we have to keep reinventing ourselves, coming up with new business initiatives that have the potential to keep us in the phase of hyper growth we’ve seen so far, rather than just modest annual growth. We’ve got a few initiatives taking place right now. We’re experimenting with retail sales as an additional channel. We’ve been surveying our customers about this, and they’re very excited about it, so we’re going to try that.