The “Great Die-Off” In Business
Traditional investor questions for entrepreneurs:
What’s your five-year plan?
What’s the three-year ROI?
What will the company look like in a year?
How many employees will you have in a year?
What’s the break even point?
What’s your exit strategy?
All solid, responsible questions. But, the answers are dramatically changing, given the “great die-off” of traditional business models. Certainly, you should have a plan, but who knows what next year – even next month – will bring? (Wasn’t the dino Bear Stearns a great business not long ago?)
Spreadsheets, with all those tidy ROI and break even projections, are nothing more than guesses on paper, regardless of who does them – a new MBA student or the Grand Poobah business consultant.
Thanks to the Web, you can build a virtual company overnight. Five years? How about five hours?
There’s expertise on call and on contract as needed – making the old military hierarchy chain-of-command style of company building obsolete. You may never have “employees” in the traditional sense.
“Break even” is dramatically different when you have almost no overhead and can run your entire IT operation at Amazon for pennies.
The “exit strategy” may well be “make $X…then close shop in two years and move on to another biz.”
All of which blows the minds of traditionalists.
You can either whine about becoming extinct, or do something about it.
Read More: The New Internet Start-Up Boom: Get Rich Slow , from Time “It’s time to stop whining. The economy might be melting down like a pat of butter on a hot Hummer roof, but for some people — you, maybe? — this could be a very good thing….At no other time in recent history has it been easier or cheaper to start a new kind of company. Possibly a very profitable company. Let’s call these start-ups LILOs, for “a little in, a lot out.” These are Web-based businesses that cost almost nothing to get off the ground yet can turn into great moneymakers (if you work hard and are patient, but we’ll get to that part of the story).”
Related Posts:
There’s A Reason They’re Called Market Windows
Three Things You Don’t Need In A Start-Up
Tags: business development, marketing troubleshooting, business funding, business models
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