Book Short: There is No Blueprint to $1B
Book Short: There is No Blueprint to $1B
Blueprint to a Billion: 7 Essentials to Achieve Exponential Growth, by David Thomson (book, Kindle) sounds more formulaic than it is. It’s not a bad book, but you have to dig a little bit for the non-obvious nuggets (yes, I get that growing your company to $1B in sales requires having a great value proposition in a high growth market!). The author looked for commonalities among the 387 American companies that have gone public since 1980 with less than $1B in revenues when they went public and had more than $1B in revenue (and were still in existence) at the time of the book’s writing in 2005.
Thompson classifies the blueprint into “7 Essentials,” which blueprint companies do well on across the board. The 7 Essentials are:
– Create and sustain a breakthrough value proposition
– Exploit a high growth market segment
– Marquee/lighthouse customers shape the revenue powerhouse
– Leverage big brother alliances for breaking into new markets
– Become the masters of exponential returns
– The management team: inside-outside leadership
– The Board: comprised of essentials experts
As I said above, there were some nuggets within this framework that made the entire read worthwhile. For example, crafting a Board that isn’t just management and investors but also includes industry experts like customers or alliance partners is critical. That matches our experience at Return Path over the years (not that we’re exactly closing in on $1B in revenues – yet) with having outside industry CEOs sit on our Board. Our Board has always been an extension of our management and strategy team, but we have specifically gotten some of our most valuable contributions and thought-provoking dialog from the non-management and non-investor directors.
Another critical item that I thought was interesting was this concept of not just marquee customers (yes, everyone wants big brand names as clients), but that they also need to be lighthouse customers. They need to help you attract other large customers to your solution – either actively by helping you evangelize your business, or at least passively by lending their name and case study to your cause.
The book is more of a retrospective analysis than a playbook, and some of its examples are a bit dated (marveling at Yahoo’s success seems a bit awkward today), and the author notes as well that many of the “blueprint” companies faltered after hitting the $1B mark. But it was a good read all-in. What I’d like to see next is a more microscopic view of the Milestones to $100 Million!
Book Short: Sequel Not Worth It
Book Short: Sequel Not Worth It
Mastering the 7 Essentials of High Growth Companies, by David Thomson, was a poor sequel to the solid Blueprint to a Billion [review] [buy]– and not worth reading if you’ve read the original. It was very short for its price and contained mildly interesting examples of “blueprint companies” that augmented the original book but didn’t uncover any new material or add any thinking to the mix. Basically, it was like another couple chapters that should have been part of Blueprint.
It is not a bad buy in lieu of the original if you haven’t read either one yet, as Blueprint is a bit longer than necessary, but otherwise, you can skip this one.
On a side note – the author’s interactive scorecard is a decent diagnostic tool (though also, I am sure, a lead gen tool for his consulting business).
links for 2005-12-02
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Good quick point of view on what makes a great employee in a startup.
links for 2005-10-22
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From our client, Business & Legal Reports, a HILARIOUS read in the strange-but-true category. This is essential reading for any manager who has ever mediated an employee dispute. Tthanks to Tami Forman for citing this one!
links for 2005-12-06
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Brad talks about comp for outside Board members
links for 2005-11-26
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Charlie O’Donnell from Union Square Ventures has a great post about LinkedIn, its limitations, and some things it could do to be MUCH cooler and more useful.
links for 2005-11-16
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Jeff Jarvis on Why We’re Glad We’re New Media…good stats on all the troubles facing “old media” nowadays (box office, newspapers, music, radio, books)
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Fred Wilson on how VCs relate to entrepreneurs vs. their limited partners. They should think of entrepreneurs as their customers, and think of LPs as shareholders.
links for 2005-10-23
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Return Path’s newly unveiled web site is now a blog, with an online resource center for email marketers and postings by its executive team
links for 2005-10-20
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Get your mind out of the gutter! These are very useful and oddly hard to find graphics for doing checklists in presentations (thanks to my colleague George Bilbrey for this link).
links for 2005-10-11
links for 2005-09-22
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Great blog posting from Rob Walling on hiring like crazy