Career Success- Starting Small, Growing Big

Career success is not just a destination but a life journey built over time, embellished with hard work and crowned with financial returns. It most times involves starting small and growing big. Unfortunately, many miss out this salient point. People have met waterloos in businesses though they set great standards stemming from big dreams, but never had the opportunity to start out in the first place. One major setback is the resource - human and financial, to start up with the high standards envisioned.
As much as it is good to leap from the cliff and soar, not many can stand the height. Many great businesses have ended up just as ideas. Had the astigmatic CEOs known, they would have jumpstarted. A small start does not mean a small business. The journey of a thousand miles starts with a step. There’s this saying I so cherish, “dream big, start small and grow fast”. It’s a pathway to success and that’s what we’re looking at today.

The key to success in entrepreneurship is to have big dreams, but start within the limits of the available resources, with innovations and diligence, reaching for the goal. Many conglomerates and successful investment giants we have today started just as small as you can imagine. It may shock you to realize what I’m about to share with you. Let’s just take a look at the success stories of some great names we know.

Hewlett-Packard (HP)

Two young graduates of Stanford University, Bill Hewlett, and Dave Packard, set out on a journey to success in 1939, but didn’t know how enormous their empire would turn out. In the city of Palo Alto, California, they found an apartment with a garage. They started up with the available but limited resources. That was the birth of a career success-HP. The good thing is that they started out, and from a Garage- that was their first workshop. Inside there, they developed and built audio oscillators (HP’s first product) while Dave was working on vacuum tube technology. Their partnership started with a working capital of $538. Soon after, they started developing series of products including calculators, and cameras. In 1966, they stepped into the computer world with the invention of the HP2116A. From a garage, they grew and evolved to become one of the world’s greatest names in Computer systems of our time. They started small and grew big.

Facebook

One of today’s most popular social network sites, Facebook, started not in an office complex with surging staff strength, but in the dormitory room of a Havard University student, Mark Zuckerberg. Its success story goes from being just a campus social network platform to a multibillion-dollar worldwide social network. First starting up as Facemash, then Thefacebook and finally after an investment by the founder of Napster, it became just Facebook. Ever since, the site has seen several transformations to facilitate the addition of new features. In just about 10 years, Facebook has become the most popular social network site globally. It’s amazing how the company that started as a one-man business in 2004 is today valued at over $50 billion with numerous staff across the globe. It started small.

Dangote Group

The success story of the conglomerate Dangote Group started in 1977 when this passionate 21 year old, ventured into trading of local commodities with the little capital lent by grandfather. The business experienced a degree of success, which encouraged Aliko Dangote, the President and CEO of Dangote Group, to incorporate two companies in 1981, just four years after. Today, the group has grown from the two companies incorporated in 1981 to no less than eighteen subsidiaries. In one of his statements Aliko Dangote said, “I built a conglomerate and emerged the richest black man in the world in 2008 but it didn’t happen overnight. It took me thirty years to get to where I am today... To build a successful business, you must start small and dream big. In the journey of entrepreneurship, tenacity of purpose is supreme”. Dangote Group also started small.

Dell

Another company of interest is Dell Corporation. Michael Dell is the founder of Dell computers. In 2001, Dell was ranked as the world’s largest seller of Personal computers and Server stations, and has assets worth billions of dollars today. The journey to success started in 1984 while 19-year-old Michael was in the University of Texas. He incorporated his company, then known as PC’s Limited, with $1,000. His dormitory room was his business office until he dropped out to give better attention to running his growing business. The company produced its first computer of Dell’s own design in 1985. The success continued and culminated into the big household name we have today. We should note that the company also started small, but has grown quite great.

Mattel

Everyone today knows the Barbie doll in so much that many take the doll for a fashion model. Barbie is a creation of Ruth and Elliot Handler. In 1945, after world war II, the couple, Elliot and Ruth, with Harold Matson (who soon after sold his shares), decided to start a small business (Mattel Creations). It all started in a garage in the Handler’s south California home. The newly married couple made and sold picture frames. Shortly after, the Handlers started making dollhouse furniture from scraps and off-cuts of the frames. Scraps, yeah I mean scraps. Scraps, yet that was the beginning of their success story. Mattel creations’ first hit toy was the “Uka-a-doodle”, a miniature plastic ukulele, which became an immediate success with huge sales. In 1959 after series of innovations, Mattel invented and released the Barbie doll. The first doll sold for about $3 and over 300,000 dolls sold in that very first year. Today, a mint condition “#1” 1959 Barbie doll can fetch as much as $27,450. Mattel brought with it a revolution to the toy market. It’s important to note that they yet again started small, with scraps and in a garage. We are still on starting small and growing big.

Ebay

Ebay as it is known today has a beautiful success story. It started in 1995 as Auction Web, an online market place for sales of goods and services. Pierre Omidyar, a French born Iranian computer programmer, wrote and finished the code for his website from his Silicon Valley home. It was an online meeting point for buyers and sellers. The first transaction successfully closed out was a broken laser pointer. Within two years, the company was already facilitating over 200,000 transactions per month. Among others, in 1996, eBay struck a deal with Electronic Travel Auction to use smart technology to sell flight tickets and other travel products. Today, eBay Incorporated is a multi-billion dollar company with operations localized in over 30 countries of the world. Millions of collectibles, appliances, décor, computers, furnishings, equipment, domain names, vehicles, and other items are listed, bought and sold daily on eBay today. The journey started small but has seen such huge success today.

Let’s not go much further. From these few companies and the people behind these successes we have seen so far, I am able to draw up some highpoints. It is obvious that to have career success and to build a business from nothing, innovation is imperative. Creativity transforms skills to the fortune needed for expansion. Consistency and progressive capacity building are stepping-stones to resounding career success. In other words, what we need to build a successful career path is to have big dreams, build good plans, start from somewhere, grow the business, then build it an empire. Start small; grow big… See you at the top.