Stage
1: Early struggles of the start-up
The
founder is often a visionary with millions of ideas, driven by a sense of
purpose and the need to define a particular market he or she wants to develop
and capture. Entrepreneurs with new businesses must devote themselves at this
stage to finding profitable and sustainable markets, and ones that will allow
them to quickly replace seed cash with a constant stream of revenue. “This is
the most dangerous point and there’s a very high mortality rate,” McKeown says.
Today’s glorification of the start-up and start-up culture is dangerous, he
says, because it encourages irresponsibility. In fact, starting a business is
all about hard, relentless work.
Les McKeown |
Stage
2: Finding the Fun
After
about three years of constant struggle, you’ve found your market and your
niche. Though your market share is likely to be miniscule, you’re having a
blast stealing business away from much larger competitors, and surprising new
customers with how great you and your business’ products are. “This is all
about sales, and it’s not hard to have triple-digit growth because this is
coming out of nothing,” McKeown says. At this stage, you should be compiling
the company myths and stories and building the brand.
View The Full Story By Jeremy Quittner At Inc.