Business Owners Toolbox Blog Discussions and articles to help the small business owner solve the challenges they face as they grow their business.

April 5, 2011

Bootstrapping. How did you start your company?

Filed under: Entrepreneurship — Tags: , , — Mike Van Horn @ 2:48 pm

LinkedIn question from Marie-Dolores Anderson. She selected my response as Best Answer!

My answer: I bought my training/consulting company–for something like $1,000–from the guy who wanted out. I worked from home. I did shoe leather marketing. I traded for services, such as printing. People paid me in advance.

As a result, I was profitable from the beginning, and never had significant debt.

This turned out to be a problem, however. Since I relied on organic growth rather than rustling up growth capital, I grew slower, and was eventually overtaken by VC-backed competitors. I still have a good business, but not as large as I had hoped.

So bootstrapping, while often necessary, is limiting. Get past this strategy as rapidly as possible.

2 Comments »

  1. You are welcome to include the article, or a quote from it, if you give me credit. Best way would be including a link back to the article on my blog.

    Comment by mvh — August 24, 2011 @ 4:07 pm

  2. Thank you, Donette
    Same thing is true for me–getting inspiration from reading other forums and blogs.

    Comment by mvh — September 15, 2011 @ 7:24 pm

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL

Leave a comment

Powered by WordPress