For Great Ventures™: Getting Your 1st Chunk of Scalable Business

Verne Harnish, The Growth Guy, mentioned the importance of the proper mindset for growing your business in his July 16, 2010 blog post.  He references John Warrillow’s book, Built to Sell, which provides 8 Steps for Creating a Sellable Firm.  While I haven’t seen the list yet, I imagine the mindset that this list helps create is very similar to the one needed to pursue your 1st chunk of scalable business.

“The vision must be followed by the venture.  It is not enough to stare up the steps – we must step up the stairs.”
– Vance Havner 

There are really just two basic strategic choices to make when building a successful venture.  The first choice is to go after any and all business around your uncommon and unique offering.  The second choice is to identify and fervently pursue the right chunk of scalable business.  Both can lead to success but only one allows for a great venture (highest potential in the shortest timeframe).

Let’s look the choice to go after any and all business around your uncommon and unique offering.  When you launch your venture with grand plans for success and challenges seem to pop-up quite regularly, you can get overwhelmed and frustrated quite easily.  So, when real business opportunities present themselves, you may eagerly engage in the exchange of goods and services for some much needed cash flow.  This cash flow relieves some pressure and allows you to survive another day, week, month, etc…

The problem with this approach is that this business exchange and these customers may create many more roadblocks on the path to a scalable business.  They may divert a tremendous amount of time, energy, and money in serving them.  They also might require constant care and attention.  They help you pay the bills but they also prevent you from scaling your business.  Not all customers are good customers when you are looking to build a great venture.

“Dealing with people is probably the biggest problem you face, especially if you are in business. Yes, and that is also true if you are a housewife, architect or engineer.”
– Dale Carnegie

A different, and perhaps better, choice is to identify and fervently pursue the right chunk of scalable business.  It takes more thought, time, and energy upfront to clearly identify and pursue the right customer with the right message at the right time.  But, the reward is much higher in terms of the level and speed of success.

You still may have to make some tactical choices along the way to take on less than ideal customers while bootstrapping your growth.  This is fine while you are getting the gears to mesh at this stage of your venture.  However, you do that while fervently pursuing the right strategic chuck of scalable business that you will build on in the future.  You need to view your ideal customers as assets to add to your business and you should strategically make choices each day to build a greater share of ideal customers in your customer base. 

“If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful.”
– Jeff Bezos

As you set out to get customers for your venture, you must get clear on your strategic choices.  That strategic choice should be to identify and fervently pursue the right chunk of scalable business if you want to build a great venture!

© Copyright 2010 Jon L. Iveson, Ph.D.