Bootstrapping Your Business – Starting From Nothing
May 28th, 2007 by 
Chris Pangburn
Guy Kawasaki has written an excellent article entitled “The Art of Bootstrapping“, which gives tips for small businesses who are starting up without funding or venture capital. These aren’t just another set of ‘frugalifying’ tips, there are various methods of cost saving and doing business which are beneficial to low-cash businesses.
Some key points from the article include focussing on cash flow not profitability, being conservative (or realistic!) in your sales forecast expectations, and not wasting or employing resources which your business doesn’t really need. One of my favourite tips from the article is to forecast from the bottom-up and not top-down. What this basically means is that you shouldn’t base your sales forecasts on figures such as ‘percent of market’, but from your actual capacity. For example if you have production facilities for say 20 units per week, then calculate how many per year you can create based on this, rather than by estimating that you will secure 1% of a 10 million total market demand.
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3 Comments »
February 28th, 2008 at 9:26 pm
This article is really help full i think author should continue to write such a help full articles.
April 9th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
I think that the author should have included some of the tips from the article mentioned. I am a big fan of Robert Kawasaki and his books. But it is important to understand that in order to be successful you must always look at both sides of the coin. What I mean is, there are lots of ways to get funding without using credit cards, investors and Venture capital firms. I share one of these great funding sources in my blog which can be found at wwwcministry.blogspot.com
January 14th, 2010 at 12:47 pm
There’s a saying which has helped me a lot:-
Turnover is vanity,
Profit is sanity.
But Cash is King!
From one person who ran a £1m+ turnover business which didn’t make any profit!