Have you ever wondered, “How can I go big in my business without a technological breakthrough?” Yeah, me, too.
In his book Discipline Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to a Successful Startup, Bill Aulet, Managing Director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, posits only two distinct types of entrepreneurship exist. Aulet’s first type includes small and medium enterprises usually started by one person to serve a local market seeking the rewards of personal independence and cash flow from the business.
The MIT professor’s second type, innovation-driven enterprise (IDE) entrepreneurship, involves more risk-taking and more ambitious as entrepreneurs, working in teams build a business off some technology, process, business model, or other innovation that will give them a significant competitive advantage over existing competitors. IDE entrepreneurs seek to create wealth through exponential growth more than to remain in control of their companies as they drive to become big and fast-growing to serve global markets with the help of venture capital from a limited number of new part-owner-investors who insist on seizing control of the enterprise.
There is, however, a third type of entrepreneurial enterprise that blends these two extremes. This third type, which is achievable by every small and medium enterprise owner, is to start, buy, run, and grow a turnkey business in order either to sell it for profit or sell duplicates of it as franchises.
Rather than being based on a technological breakthrough, turnkey businesses based on quality management improvements drive the success of the clear majority of small businesses in America and around the world today. Quality management improvement drives better businesses to be more effective, more efficient, and, therefore, much more profitable than their competitors in many ways.
Unlike Aulet’s SME model, the turnkey model blends the best of both entrepreneurial worlds. It begins with a focus on local, then regional markets, but has the end game of letting others rent the business process the turnkey entrepreneur innovates. The turnkey quality management system innovated allows for duplicable jobs, instead of tradable jobs, which multiply employment instead of merely relocating employees. And, most importantly, it grows exponentially with the franchisor staying in control of his or her business model and operations, while each franchisee begins with and maintains control of his or her own personal risk, reward, and destiny.
Whether you want to be a small business owner, an IDE entrepreneur, or an owner/franchisor, if you want to truly own your own business and get the biggest return on your investment of your life’s precious resources of self, time, effort, energy, emotion, intellect, property, and people in your business, then you must use the P10 Principle to start, buy, run, grow, and sell your business as a turnkey operation and begin with one location and let other people rent your business processes as franchisees.
[reminder]What are you doing to turnkey your business?[/reminder]