Determining the size of the business you want to build is vital. You must know what you’re built for. Are you shooting for a million-dollar company, a billion-dollar company, or something in between?
It might seem strange to be thinking about how big a company you want to build when you haven’t even started your business and don’t even know what type of business you’re going to start. Please suspend any disbelief because I’ve learned that if you can begin your entrepreneurial journey with the end in mind, you’ll get there faster and avoid a lot of frustration. You’ll make better decisions and avoid many of the mistakes you don’t need to make.
The Size of Your Business Matters
In Entrepreneurial Leap, I provide a glimpse into the various options available when it comes to the type and size of business you want to start. In this post, we are going to focus on discovering the size of business that is right for you.
Top-line annual revenue ($1 million, $10 million, $100 million) will be used as the gauge of size. Revenue is used as the gauge because it’s the most widely recognized measure of a company’s size. Bottom-line profits and number of employees are also important measures.
All of the media hype about billion-dollar companies has almost every entrepreneur-in-the-making wanting to build a company that size. I beg you to reconsider. Building a billion-dollar company isn’t the fantasy portrayed in the press, and most entrepreneurs aren’t equipped to start and build a billion-dollar company every step of the way. The person capable of pulling it off is truly one in a million. Not only that, but if you could somehow put yourself in the CEO seat, at the helm of the billion-dollar company that you think you want 10 years from now, most of you would likely say, “Holy shit, I don’t want that life!”
Know Your Entrepreneurial Makeup
I have many clients who compare themselves to a local billionaire. My response is always, “With all due respect, you are not him.” They have no idea what it’s like to live the life he had to, to build what he has built—the press, the competition, the personal sacrifices, the complexity, the demands, and the microscope you’re always under. It’s magnified greatly at that level. I know I couldn’t have done it, and most entrepreneurs couldn’t, either.
You don’t have to shoot that high. A friend of mine is great at building and selling $10 million companies. He has done it twice and is now on his third one. He tried to build a $100 million company once, and it failed. I told him, “I think your genetic encoding is building $10 million companies.” He looked back and realized that was true, and it’s what he has done ever since.
You can make a huge impact, become very wealthy, and help a lot of people by building $10 million companies.
You can take any type of business and build it to whatever size you choose. You can build a house-cleaning company to anywhere from $100,000 to $1 billion. The country’s largest house-cleaning company earns almost $20 billion in revenue. You can build a million-dollar used-car dealership or a billion-dollar network of car dealerships. You can build a software company that does $5 million, $50 million, or $500 million in revenue. The beauty is that you get to decide.
Next Steps
Take a minute right now to determine the size of business you think fits best within your genetic wiring.
