Small Is the New Big
August 01, 2007
A growing number of businesses are discovering that getting big is not the best measure of accomplishment. Which are the ones setting the trend?
In April 17, 2000, Gary Erickson was about to fulfill the wildest hopes of any business entrepreneur. That morning he drove to the Berkeley office of Clif Bar, a company he'd founded eight years earlier, and got ready to sign papers selling it to food giant Quaker Oats for $120 million. Erickson would take home half that: a cool $60 million.
It was a remarkable rags-to-riches story for a guy who at age 33 was living in his parents' garage and making less than $10,000 a year when he envisioned a more wholesome energy snack. An avid outdoors enthusiast, he hit upon the idea on the last stretch of a one-day, 175-mile bike ride as he realized he couldn't stomach another bite of energy bars that tasted like cardboard. His initial investment was $1,000, and R&D was done in his mom's kitchen. He named the product for his dad. But rather than feeling on top of the world about this dream deal, Erickson was uneasy. "I stood in the office waiting to go out and sign the contract," he recounts in his book Raising the Bar. "Out of nowhere, I started to shake and couldn't breathe." He told his business partner that he needed to get some air. Outside in the parking lot, he broke down in tears. And then it hit him as he began to walk around the block: "I don't have to do this. "I began to laugh, feeling free," he writes. "I turned around, went back to the office and told my partner, 'Send them home. I can't sell the company.'"
Erickson stubbornly clung to the idea of guiding Clif Bar according to his own vision, not the business-as-usual paradigm of rapid expansion fueled by massive outside investment. "If we had sold to Quaker Oats, we would just be another bar on the shelf," Erickson explains, sitting at a small desk in his surprisingly modest office that looks out on the sidewalk where he made the fateful decision. "We would not have an environmental program; we would not have given $1.2 million last year to charity in money and products. We would not have gone organic. No one working here would even be here now."
Read the entire article
For Businesses, Small Is the New Big
By Jay Walljasper, Ode. Posted July 24, 2007.
Another great read is...
Small Is the New Big: and 183 Other Riffs, Rants, and Remarkable Business Ideas
by Seth Godin
posted by Jay @ 8/01/2007,
