The 7 Ages Of Your Business - From Enthusiasm To Exhaustion | Small business news; tips; networking

Posted by edragonu under Strategy
From http://www.dragosroua.com 905 days ago
Made Hot by: JanetG on August 18, 2009 10:43 am

Each business has 7 ages: enthusiasm, naivety, attention, maturity, expansion, leadership and exhaustion.

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Written by edragonu
904 days ago

Definitely1 The last phase is the place when you start to reinvent yourself, if you still want to remain in that business. Reinventing implies also "killing" what was once the core of the business in order to make room for the new stuff. As you pointed, this can happen from the inside (as Apple did) or from the outside (when competition strikes).

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Written by ShawnHessinger
904 days ago

Dragos,

I'm wondering if from a strategy standpoint the exhaustion phase or sometime before this is the time when, as Guy Kawasaki says in The Art of the Start, it's time to "kill the cash cows". This is what Kawasaki argues Apple was able to do successfully by building Apple II, using it to fuel Macintosh, than making their original product obsolete (instead of letting a competitor do it) leaving competitors in the dust while they moved on to bigger and better things.

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Written by m4bmarketing
905 days ago

Your article spells out the stages so clearly and the way it was written makes it easy to identify with. You said that you stayed in the 7th stage for a year. In your experience do successful people move through the early stages quickly?

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Written by edragonu
904 days ago

Not necessarily. In depends a lot on the field. Sometimes you have to stay there in the early stages just to learn.

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