There’s a specific moment I’ve seen happen at almost every startup I’ve ever worked with. It usually hits somewhere between year one and year three, often during the holidays or right when a big customer order comes in.
Something breaks. An order is late. A shipment gets lost. A vendor goes dark. Inventory numbers don’t match reality. And suddenly, the founder who has been sprinting to grow the business has to stop everything and deal with their supply chain — the part of the business they were quietly hoping would just figure itself out.
That moment is the supply chain wake-up call. And by the time it arrives, it has usually already cost more than it needed to.
I want to give you the version of that conversation before the crisis happens.
Why supply chain gets ignored in the early days
I get it. When you’re starting out, supply chain doesn’t feel urgent. You’re focused on product, sales, fundraising, hiring. The supply chain is just the thing that gets orders out the door. It’s working. Good enough.
The problem is that “good enough” has a shelf life. What works when you’re shipping 50 orders a month quietly breaks when you’re shipping 500. What works with one vendor breaks when you have six. What works when you’re in one market breaks when you expand to three.
By the time the cracks show, they’re not little cracks anymore.
The three most expensive surprises
From the startups I’ve worked with, the wake-up call usually comes in one of three forms:
The inventory problem. You run out of something critical at the worst possible time, or you’re holding so much of something that cash is tied up for months. Either way, you were operating without real visibility into what you actually had and what was coming.
The vendor problem. A vendor you’ve relied on fails to deliver, raises prices, or just stops communicating. You don’t have backup options. You built your operations around one relationship and it snapped.
The scaling problem. Everything was fine at your current volume. Then you grew, and suddenly none of your processes work anymore. Your warehouse layout, your picking system, your shipping contracts — all of it needs to be rebuilt at scale.
What you can do about it now
You don’t need to build a world-class supply chain on day one. But there are a few things that will save you an enormous amount of pain later:
Get visibility. Know what inventory you have, where it is, and what’s coming in. Even a well-maintained spreadsheet is better than nothing.
Diversify your vendors. Never let one vendor be the single point of failure for anything critical. Qualifying a backup vendor before you need one is always easier than finding one under pressure.
Document your processes. If your entire supply chain operation lives in one person’s head, you don’t have an operation — you have a liability.
Talk to someone who’s done it. Not to buy a consulting engagement, but just to get a sanity check on whether what you’re building will hold up.
The goal isn’t perfection
The point is that a little attention paid to your supply chain early — before the crisis — will save you more time, money, and stress than you can imagine. The companies that get this right don’t necessarily have the most sophisticated systems. They just build things that are resilient enough to bend without breaking.
That’s what we help companies do. And if you want to talk through where you are and what could go wrong, I’m always up for that conversation.
Mina Hanna is the founder of KD Hanna, a supply chain consulting firm helping startups and growing businesses build resilient operations. Get in touch →