Why Great Ideas Take Time
Don't
let the quick path to IPOs or acquisitions fool you. Slow growth is usually
smart growth.
You
couldn't be blamed for crying about the passing of Daniel Keyes, most famously the author
of Flowers for Algernon. That tear-jerker of a tale has been a staple of
middle-school and junior-high curricula since the late 60s.
Though
Keyes wrote eight other books, he's best remembered for Algernon, which
debuted as a short story in 1959. Here's the thing: Keyes first came up with
the idea nearly 15 years earlier. The New York Times describes
how it happened:
The
premise underlying Mr. Keyes's best-known novel struck him while he waited for
an elevated train to take him from Brooklyn to New York University in
1945. "I thought: My education is driving a wedge between me and the
people I love," he wrote in his memoir, Algernon, Charlie and I
(1999). "And then I wondered: What would happen if it were possible to
increase a person's intelligence?" After 15 years that thought grew
into the novella Flowers for Algernon, which was published in The Magazine
of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1959 and won the Hugo Award for best
short fiction in 1960.
Keyes'
15-year wait was just the beginning. Algernon didn't become a
full-length novel until 1966. It didn't become a movie until 1968. The novel
eventually sold five-million copies. Keyes' death at age 86 reminds us
that sometimes, bestselling ideas take a long time to develop.
This
shouldn't be news to enterpreneurs. The history of small business is littered
with countless cases of companies whose breakthroughs required years of
patience. Inc's 1985 profile of Crate
& Barrel--which
we reran today in homage to Twitter's "throwback Thursday"--provides
a great example. Crate didn't open its third store until its sixth year of
existence, in 1971. Nor did it train its first bona fide full-time manager
until that same year.
A
more recent example comes from Scott Nash, founder of $100-million MOM's Organic
Market. Launched in 1987, MOM's today has--wait for it--11 stores in three
states.
But
to Nash, that rate is not slow. It's normal. It took him three years after
his initial launch in his mother's garage to open the first actual store.
Thirteen years later--in 2000--he was up to a whopping three locations.
The
pace might seem petty, but for Nash, it's an intentional strategy he devised by
studying the one-year-at-a-time approaches of Trader Joe's, Costco, and
Apple. "Strategic growth includes an element of scarcity," he
told Inc earlier this year. "The key for us has been setting the
speed at which we're able to grow structurally while also protecting our
scarcity--the mysteriousness of the MOM's brand."
For
today's entrepreneurs and aspirants, it's important to keep the growth stories
of Crate and MOM's in mind, especially when the business media--including Inc--can
showcase startups on the fast track to IPOs or lucrative acquisitions.
Of
course, those hypergrowth companies sometimes offer lessons in patience, too.
2U, the online education tech company, went from startup to $100-million IPO in six years. Cofounder Chip Paucek told Inc's Scott
Leibs about their early struggles.
Inc: You cofounded a
capital-intensive tech company in 2008, when funding was scarce. What got you
through those early days?
Paucek: First, although it's an
overused word, passion; we believed we had a great idea and that we could build
it. That said, if some of the members of the founding team weren't individually
wealthy, we wouldn't have made it through. My current COO covered payroll twice
with his own money. Third, we persuaded a great school, USC, to treat online
students as completely equal to on-campus students, and that was not an obvious
approach. Landing USC as our first client was pivotal.
As
2U's tale points out, the journey is seldom quick and easy for anyone--even
fast-track startups.
So
don't be fooled into thinking that speed is everything. Yes, this is an era
where failing fast is expected and often honored. But Keyes' life--and the real-life
histories of Crate and MOM's and even 2U--serve as reminders that the best
ideas rarely blossom overnight.
BY Ilan
Mochari
http://www.inc.com/ilan-mochari/slow-smart-growth.html?cid=em01020week25c
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