These relatively quick beginnings happened without months of struggling to get a perfect product, no long period of due diligence investigation, no lengthy business plan, and no venture capital involved. By getting off the ground quickly, these entrepreneurs have avoided the danger of trying to get their idea perfect before going to market, and spending so much time doing this, that the opportunity passed by never to return. That has been the fate of many great ideas that never made it.
In this article we will briefly discuss some of the million dollar businesses I found in the hope you will get some ideas about your own business. At the end we will briefly mention the weekend plan to get a business up and running. Another reason for the article is to help you realize it really is possible to make an idea, sometimes seemingly fantastic, become a going concern generating millions of dollars and employment for numbers of workers. This is very real, as you will see.
Here are some examples.
PILLOW PETS
This company originated when the entrepreneur observed how her children would take stuffed animals and beat them down into shapes for comfortable pillows. She decided to create stuffed animals that unfolded as plush pillows.
With the help of her husband, in 2003 they began selling their stuffed animals at malls and wholesaled them to retailers. She showed the products at a home show and the business exploded. Sales in 2010 were around $300 million.
TOM'S OF MAINE
This company had its start in 1970 after a couple who moved to Maine looking for a simpler life discovered they could not find the natural and unprocessed products they wanted. They decided to create these things themselves. They borrowed $5,000 to start Tom’s. This enabled the owners to sell their all-natural shampoo and personal care products to natural food stores; their real breakthrough occurred later with the launch of their main product, Tom’s of Maine toothpaste.
On their Website Tom’s of Maine states their reason for being:
To serve our customers' health needs with imaginative science from plants and minerals;In 1999 sales at Tom’s were over $40 million, and in 2006 they sold 84% of the company to Colgate Palmolive for $100 million. Not bad for a family startup.
To inspire all those we serve with a mission of responsibility and goodness;
To empower others by sharing our knowledge, time, talents, and profits; and
To help create a better world by exchanging our faith, experience, and hope.
BOSTON BEER COMPANY
The founder of this company belonged to a family of brewers with a long history in the business. Though his ancestors had been in the beer business since the 1800s, the founder left the family business after he realized the big brewers were taking over the business and downgrading flavorful beers.
As soon as the founder of the Boston Beer Company realized the demand for craft and flavored beers was beginning to increase, he dug out his great-great-grandfather’s recipe and started brewing in his kitchen. After perfecting his recipe, he quit his job as a management consultant and began peddling Samuel Adams Boston Beer Lager door to door to Boston bars.
The company is now the largest craft beer brewer. The Boston Beer Company had $513 million in net revenue during 2011.
K’NEX
The founder of K’NEX came up with the idea at a wedding when he was sitting at a table and began to cut and connect a bunch of straws. He obviously was not too interested in the wedding, but it gave him the idea for a plastic construction toy. He approached Mattel and Hasbro, and both turned him down, so he decided to make it himself. To do this, he shut down a portion of his family’s molded plastic business.
Shortly after K’NEX went on the market in 1993, the founder of Toys R Us said it was the best thing he’d seen in many years. Sales are anticipated to be about $100 million in 2012.
1-800-FLOWERS.COM
This flower company was started by a bartender and social worker who was looking for a source of extra income. In 1976 he bought a New York flower shop for $10,000 and expanded his business to 13 more stores in the metro area. Later, in 1986, he acquired the telephone number 1-800-FLOWERS. After that his flower business really flourished. He was the first flower business to put a telephone number in its name.
In 2011 the company reported total revenue of $689.8 million.
NANDA HOME
Always being late for college classes because of over-sleeping provided the idea for Clocky, the subject of this Website. This entrepreneur chose a way to solve one of her own biggest problems as her entry in an MIT Graduate School design contest. The design was for an alarm clock, fitted with two wheels so the clock would roll of the night table it was on. This would force the sleeper to get out of bed and search for the clock in order to shut it off.
According to Wikipedia, the entrepreneur had no plans to commercialize her prize-winning design. However, several events changed her mind. A few months after a description of Clocky appeared on her school’s Website, pictures of the device appeared on tech blogs like Gizmodo, Engadget, and others. Within two weeks of these blogs, the entrepreneur was asked to demonstrate Clocky on Good Morning America.
Soon after this she obtained backing from her family, applied for a patent, and outsourced production to Hong Kong. By 2011 there had been 350,000 Clockys sold, with thousands of retailers all over the world. Sales have approached $10 million, with products priced from $8 to $58.
BILLY BOB TEETH
The idea for Billy Bob Teeth came at a football game in 1994. This is the kind of unbelievable thing we should constantly look for; nobody knows when an off-the-wall occurrence will trigger a new million dollar enterprise. The entrepreneur who started Billy Bob Teeth saw a man with terrible looking teeth talking trash to the spectators around him. The entrepreneur talked with the man and found that he was a budding dentist who had made the teeth as a joke while in dental school.
At the time the entrepreneur was living in a cave behind his parents’ house and working several jobs just to make ends meet. He and the dental student made some more teeth and began selling them one at a time. The student left the business to pursue his career as a dentist while the entrepreneur established Billy Bob Teeth which has now sold over $50 million worth of Billy Bob Teeth.
KNORK
Here is another unusual idea that turned into a million dollar business. The entrepreneur behind Knork was having a rough time cutting his pizza with only a fork. He noticed a worker using a pizza cutter to cleanly slice through the pizza and wondered how the two could be put together. He did nothing about his idea until a few years later when he was in college.
In 2001, the entrepreneur borrowed $10,000 from his father and Knork was off and running. At first there was only the fork that doubled as a knife, but that developed into a full range line of flatware.
Knork forks have finger rests and sharpened tines on both sides so they may be used by left or right handed people. All the flatware is dishwasher safe.
Knork Flatware brought in $2 million in sales during 2011.
SENDABALL
Another unusual idea. Who would think people would send bouncing balls as greeting cards? These entrepreneurs are sisters who had been writing on balls for years and sending them to friends. One day someone approached one of them in the post office line and paid her to send a ball to their friend. Remembering the advice of a business advisor, “If someone offers to pay you to do something you are already doing, you may have a business!!!,” they formed SENDaBALL in 2003.
Their main office is in the garage of one sister even today. The company has made more than $1 million in gross sales.
HEADBLADE
This entrepreneur began to lose his hair in his early twenties (just like I did). He decided to shave his head, but there was no satisfactory equipment available, so he decided to design his own razors.
In 1998 he borrowed money from family and friends, found a manufacturer, and started his Website.
In 2000 Time Magazine named HeadBlade one of the best designs of 2000. The company really boomed after that. The product is now sold in up to 20,000 stores in the US and revenues are $7 to $10 million annually.
LUCKY BREAK WISHBONE
Here is another idea that is outside the mainstream of things that should result in a viable and profitable business that generates more than $1 million in revenue. This is Lucky Break Wishbone (http://www.luckybreakwishbone.com/). The entrepreneur behind this got the idea at Thanksgiving dinner in 1999. He realized there was only one wishbone, but many people, mostly young children, wanted a chance to make a wish, but would not be able to because there was only one bone. He did some research and found a substance that would break just like a natural wishbone.
The product is now in about 800 stores and it has produced around $4 million in sales.
UGLYDOLL
UglyDoll is a love story as well as a success story for a new business. The entrepreneurs met as students at a design school in 1996, but the female member was forced to return to Korea for several years when her student visa expired. One of the letters to Korea had a small figure at the bottom, which the lady from Korea used to make a small doll that she sent to her friend in the US. He showed the doll to a friend who had a pop culture store in California, and the owner asked for more. This is how UglyDoll started.
They not only started UglyDoll in 2002, but they have been married in the years since then. The company has generated more than $100 million in sales.
GEESE POLICE
Geese Police began in 1986 when the entrepreneur worked at a golf course that was plagued by Canada Geese. He tried several dog breeds that did not work before he finally settled on a Border Collie as the ideal dog. Since then he has trained 35 dogs.
The company now has 11 franchises around the US and generates about $2.8 million in revenue each year.
The entrepreneur constantly reminds himself how lucky he is to be able to make money playing with dogs.
BRIEF RESUME OF HOW TO QUICKLY CREATE A MILLION DOLLAR BUSINESS
In this report Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek, and a friend present a detailed plan of how to create a million dollar business in one weekend.
The plan is described in four steps. We will briefly tell you about them and you can go to the report for all the details. The mission is to show how you can get a $1,000,000 business idea going in one weekend. One of the authors has done this several times exactly as he describes. His view is that most business ideas do not require you to spend a lot of time building the foundation. One of his ideas developed over a weekend grew to more than a million dollars in a year.
The purpose of the quick beginning is to keep you from wasting a lot of time perfecting a product and then find that nobody wants it. Using the plan, you develop only a simple essence of your item.
First Step
This is where you determine what your profitable idea really is. What you are looking for is something a lot of people are willing to spend money to get. Write a list of ideas you think could be profitable; if you have trouble with ideas, see the article for ways to find them.
Second Step
Here is where you try to find a million dollars worth of customers. The main article will show you some ways to do this.
The main article also shows how to develop a Google Spreadsheet to examine prime business aspects of your competitors.
Third Step
This is where you to try to determine your customer’s value to your new product. One of the authors used the example of a Chihuahua dog to see what a customer might be worth. See the article for how he did this.
With this information you can determine the Total Available Market formula (TAM). To estimate your new product’s potential use this formula:
(Number of available customers) x (Value of each customer) = TAM
When your TAM is more than $1,000,000, you have a potential winner–you are ready to start getting your business off the ground.
Fourth Step
Now that you know you have a potential $1,000,000 idea, it’s time to see if customers will actually pay for your new product. This is called validation. See the article for how to do this.
CONCLUSION
The purpose of this article is twofold.
First, it is meant to show that almost any idea, no matter how strange, can be the basis of a million dollar business. Who would have ever thought that obnoxious looking teeth could be the foundation of a profitable business? Or what about bouncing balls as post cards? Or plastic wishbones?
Playing with dogs to chase geese off golf courses is really unbelievable. And then there is the love story that brought to life UglyDolls. All the examples in this article are actual ongoing businesses right now.
The other thing this article is meant to show is that a going business can be started without a lot of research and without venture capital; most of these businesses started with $10,000 or less provided by family, friends, or credit cards.
We have discussed a number of actual examples of million dollar businesses that started very small, often from a home or college dormitory, and quickly grew to multi-million dollar enterprises. These companies made it big largely without venture capital money. We have also talked about how business schools overplay the importance of thinking big, in terms of billions of dollars, rather than acknowledging the significance of $1,000,000 startups.
Also discussed was an actual plan used to start several million dollar ideas from scratch. You need to read the actual plan in order to do what it says. The four steps are straightforward and you can accomplish all of these steps in a very short time, usually in 48 hours or less.
Pay attention to this article and you, too, may be able to launch a million dollar company.
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