The art of building a successful company: often the starting point is having an unshakable faith based on inadequate evidence.

AuthorVillers, Philippe

The business of starting and building new enterprises is one of the most exciting and fascinating, and at times frustrating, games that I think any of us in management knows. As a cofounder of Computervision Corp., and a founder of other companies--including Automatix Inc., which developed and produced robotic and artificial visions systems, and Cognition Inc., which designed and sold computer-aided engineering systems for mechanical and electrical engineers--I have some opinions to share on what it takes to build a quality company.

The first observation I would make is that there are no single right answers. There are a number of answers or methods, and would-be entrepreneurs have to find which of the viable ones meet their style, their beliefs, their aspirations--which, in other words, are natural for them. It is not good to try to be everything to everybody, or to try to adopt somebody else's style because one happens to have read about it. So my observations are personal as to myself and the people with whom I have worked, and are directed to the style that felt right for us--and still does--without claiming any absolute merit to one over another.

Let's first start with "the team." There are very few businesses--certainly not in high technology, which is what I know best--where the universal man or woman can take care of all the essential functions required to succeed. Therefore, having a well-qualified and complete team is absolutely crucial, because there are a certain number of bases that must be covered in a very excellent manner. In addition to the technical, these include the financial, marketing, and--for many other than purely software businesses--the manufacturing functions. Also, when one grows larger, often overlooked are the human resources--dealing with the people factor. Last but not least, there has to be leadership at the top.

These are the ingredients it takes in terms of the initial team. How many of these are required to succeed? I would contend all. A fatal flaw in any one of these is likely to cause an otherwise potentially successful enterprise to fail.

Next, there has to be a well-defined goal. If you don't have one you are not likely to get capital in the first place, so that's self-curing in that sense. In addition, if you set ambitious but reasonably realistic goals for yourself and plan accordingly, you've got a chance of meeting them. The chance of meeting ambitious goals without ever having set them forth in the first place is, I believe, negligible, particularly in the kind of high-growth situations required for leadership in the high-tech field.

There must be planning for growth. For high-technology companies in young fields to have a chance for leadership, they have to grow at least as fast as or faster than the field, especially if there is no entrenched leadership yet. That typically means that in a space of five years you have to aspire to grow from nothing to a sales volume of $20 million to $200 million, depending on the selected field. In many, if not most years, your company will double or triple in size. That in itself is a formidable...

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