How to Make $400 Million in 10 Years...Really?

How to Make $400 Million in 10 Years

That’s the title of an article I found in the inc.com archives’. I really am a sucker for an article with a title like that. In 10 years I can be how rich? I’m in  Of course it’s never as easy as it seems and it takes a lot of hard work and a little bit of luck.

The article talks about a company called the Lamp Post Group which is an incubator of sorts that is also part of a company that offers shipping logistics. The company wanted to build something bigger then just a logistics company. So the company used excess revenue to build an incubator where they launch or take over start-ups and organize them around one back-office structure. The idea behind the concept is that the people running each of these businesses can worry about building great products and marketing the crap out of those products. Let someone else worry about the accounting, web design and all other aspects of the business. Just grow baby!!

The article has 5 rules to set up when searching for explosive growth. The 5 rules are:

1. Invent New Revenue Streams

2. Empower Employees

3. Remove Barriers

4. Capitalize on What IS Already Built

5. Identify a Specialty

The Company is always on the look for new revenue streams based on issues that they have if they find a problem that they need fixed they go find a small company that sells the service they need then they acquire the company and figure out how to sell it to other companies. Some of these companies have been involved with helping companies finding entry-level employees coming out of local colleges as an example.

They empower employees by building work teams known as Pods that have both revenue and cost goals and focus on specific functions. This allows employees to really own and fix different parts of the company. Would we be able to enter the retail or high end goods market if we had a 3 person team that focused on one or both of these projects? How far could we go in just a few years? What would happen if they focused on improving our manufacturing processes. Two years a go we found a piece of machine that has saved us big on our material cutting  by automating cutting weg replaced 3 cutters with one and reducing out material waste per yard by 30 to 40 percent. This adds up quick.

Less important but time consuming tasks become barriers to growth. The entrepreneurs that should focused on growing a business can get tied up on all the day to day things from HR and web design to accounting. Any time not used to growing a new business is slowing down its grow.

The last thing is find a specialty that you can use to your advantage like your ability to develop certain types of products.

The article is very good and worth checking out. I suggest you give it a read.