CREATE THE ABILITY TO SCALE
If growth can be managed without adding employees or new complexity, then there are effectively no limits to what one individual or a small number of people can accomplish: Go-it-alone entrepreneurs have figured out precisely how to accomplish this. In the wide range of industries in which they operate, these entrepreneurs have developed simple business systems that magnify their skills and allow their businesses to scale. In many cases, it’s almost hard to imagine that businesses of such significant sizes are run entirely by solo entrepreneurs.
In fact, there is nothing mysterious about how these entrepreneurs create businesses that scale. The business systems involved are discussed in detail later in this book. It’s important to point out, though, that these businesses can grow precisely because the founders have spent a great deal of their energy thinking through exactly how the business will operate. One book of tremendous value to any start-up entrepreneur that addresses this issue is The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It 
, by Michael Gerber. As Gerber forcefully demonstrates, a substantial portion of the founder’s time must be spent working on the business, not in the business.
MAINTAIN AN EXPERIMENTAL ATTITUDE
If you ask what businesses will, in all likelihood, succeed or fail in the next 18 months, there is only one sure answer: Those that are still doing things today the way they did 18 months ago are far more likely to have failed.
We live in a world of extreme competition. With instant communication and the Internet, we no longer compete against other providers or suppliers in our neighborhood, our city, or even our state. Often, we are literally competing with people
