Lesson #7 The best ideas are scalable

Filed in archive Entrepreneurship on December 25, 2006

Link:What did you learn this year?

This is another consideration that was running through my head while coming up with the idea for my first bootstrap business launch this year.

And I really have to say it will probably be a concept that remains central to what I've learned about selecting the right business idea.

Wikipedia describes scalability in part as:

...a desirable property of a system, a network or a process, which indicates its ability to either handle growing amounts of work in a graceful manner, or to be readily enlarged.

One of the problems with overly complex business plans is that they try to anticipate every possible operation of a business from the very beginning creating a series of elaborate projections which may or may not be based on the real world.

The bootstrap approach focuses instead on starting simply, but what I've learned this year is that the most important thing about a good business idea is that it leaves plenty of room for growth-even if you're not certain what that growth might be right now.

When coming up with my first bootstrap business idea I tried to think of something that could expand far beyond its humble beginnings. There are possibilities for more websites, more e-commerce even brick and mortar applications to n10ah and I hope to see all become a reality.

For more on the importance of scalability, see number 5 of "9 Business Selection Criteria" from musings of an Entrepreneur