Many young vibrant youths search endlessly for magic shortcuts to entrepreneurial success and fulfillment when the only real path is staring them right in the face: real entrepreneurs who start real businesses that employ real people who provide real products and services to real customers.
What does it really take to start up? A brilliant idea? A great team? Money? Yes. All of those things. But more than anything what it takes, is belief. A belief that there is significance to the problem being addressed and that the solution is something that the consumer wants.
It is really amazing how most large companies have such humble stories of starting up. All of them started with nothing but just plain conviction. Here we have compiled for you four short stories of starting up of (now) famous companies:
At 65 years of age, Colonel Sanders received his first social security cheque of $99. He was broke and owned a small house and a beat-up car. He made a decision that things had to change. His friends used to like his chicken recipe very much. The fact that this was the only novel idea he had, he decided to act upon it.
1. Colonel Sanders | Kentucky Fried Chicken
At 65 years of age, Colonel Sanders received his first social security cheque of $99. He was broke and owned a small house and a beat-up car. He made a decision that things had to change. His friends used to like his chicken recipe very much. The fact that this was the only novel idea he had, he decided to act upon it.
He left Kentucky and started his travels to different US states to sell his idea. He would tell restaurant owners that he had a chicken recipe that people liked and he was ready to give it to them for free, in return for a small percentage of the items sold. He got rejection after rejection but did not give up. In fact, he got over 1000 rejections.
He got 1009 NOs before he got his first Yes. With that one success Colonel Hartland Sanders changed the eating habits of the whole world with Kentucky Fried Chicken, popularly known as KFC.
2. Soichiro Honda | Honda Motor Co.
Honda was a mechanic at a garage. His job was to tune cars to prepare them for races. Honda founded Tōkai Seiki, a piston rings manufacturing company in 1937.
This company won a contract to supply piston rings to an established automobile company - Toyota. But soon after, he lost the contract due to the poor quality of the products. He took time out to better understand Toyota's quality control processes, and by 1941, Honda was able to mass produce piston rings acceptable to Toyota.
Toyota took a 40% stake in his company, but Honda was demoted from president to senior managing director. Tōkai Seiki's manufacturing plants were destroyed in US bomb attacks in 1944. Honda sold the salvageable remains of the company to Toyota and used the proceeds to found the Honda Technical Research Institute in October 1946.
He worked with a staff of 12 men in a 172-square-foot shack. They built and sold improvised motorized bicycles by building their own copy of Tohatsu engines and supplying these to customers to attach to their bicycles. Honda Motor Company grew in a short time to become the world's largest manufacturer of motorcycles by 1964.
Honda thereafter entered into mini pick-up trucks & finally into the car segment and today is a serious competitor to Toyota.
3. Jeff Bezos | Amazon.com
Most people know Amazon.com as the world’s largest online retailer. While this is where the company stands in today’s day and age, it is important to note that its history dates back to when it was founded in 1994.
Jeff Bezos incorporated Amazon in July 1994, with the website launching to the public a year later. According to Quora, the original name was going to be "Cadabra," but Bezos misheard it as "cadaver."
It is easy to believe that Amazon has had loads of success since day one, but this is not exactly true. In fact, the company has taken many turns over the years to reach the heights at which it stands today.
Early on, Amazon was not a retailer of "all things." Instead, the company focused primarily on books, the first of which was sold out of Bezos' garage. Of course, this has changed quite a bit over the years as the company now sells everything from toys to clothes to furniture and much more.
On May 15, 1997, Amazon issued its initial public offering of stock for $18/share. Even though Amazon had a solid business plan in place, investors began to worry about the future because the company had no intentions of making a profit for the first five years.
At the time, this plan was frustrating for investors. However, it ended up being a blessing in disguise as Amazon was able to navigate its way through the dot-com bubble that crushed so many others in the e-commerce space.
During the first quarter of 2001, Amazon finally became profitable, posting revenue of $1 billion with a profit of $5 million. This may have been a small profit for the company, but it justified the plan that Bezos set in place from day one.
In the early days, it was difficult to look ahead and see Amazon as the number one online retailer in the world - but this is exactly what happened. The company now has separate websites for a variety of markets, including the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Italy, Japan, and China among others.
Although a lot has changed for Amazon over the years, the company has remained true to its roots in many ways.
It’s easy to look at these companies and think, “I could never do something like this.” Of course, all of these companies took decades to get where they are today. But they had an idea and they believed in it and most importantly, they started.
