The Small Business Life Cycle: The No-Fluff Guide to Navigating the Five Stages of Small Business Growth

Each new solution that your business develops should be at least as profitable as the last solution you developed. The exception is if this new solution is primarily meant to acquire new customers that you can sell a more profitable solution to down the road. Just be sure you make that link so the

Many experienced former employees spend a lot of time beating themselves up for having to learn so many of the entrepreneurial lessons that they thought they would know already.

that's what your job is to do now – test, fail, and iterate, while keeping your offers down to as few variables as possible.

What small things could you bring to people’s worlds that would solve their pervasive frustration in small ways?

Bootstrapped businesses have a huge advantage of being customer-focused out of necessity, but at the same time their growth comes from what they pull in—and a growing business is a hungry business. So much of the early stage resources are put into the day-to-day hustle that there’s rarely any left over for strategic investments in the people, proce

You'll note that I've started with you as the center of your business building process, and there's a reason for this. Part of the challenge of getting something started is that you look externally into the world and you see all sorts of things that you might do. That array of choices keeps you from doing something.

There’s another huge upshot of developing simple, doable solutions: your customers get quick and early wins. If they get quick wins, they’re more likely to stick with your business as it grows because they’ve had a positive experience.

we entrepreneurs are capable of solving all sorts of problems. Yet many of the problems aren’t real problems - they're things we made up. As Thomas Jefferson said, "How much pain they have cost us, the evils which have never happened."

The first thing to do to make it through Stage 1 is to focus on what I call your “beachhead” offer.