Bootstrapper solves printer problems (Part 6)
A steady cash flow remains crucial to the bootstrapping method since bootstrapping entrepreneurs use cash flow to grow their business instead of outside investment.
As blogger and entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki observes:
Cash is not only king, it's queen and prince too for a bootstrapper.
Rather than spend a projected $1 million quoted to him by both Microsoft and Oracle for construction of a database to manage the increasing influx of orders for online services at his company, Field had an employee build a miniature model on Microsoft Access.
The system has steadily grown in complexity as the business evolves and today has been valued at $20 million.
Field believes in the end he got a more flexible application than any multi-million dollar system installed all at once could ever have been.
"Because we did it little by little, I got what I wanted," he said.