Today, I interviewed Bo Burlingham, who is an editor for Inc. Magazine and author of a few noteworthy books, such as Small Giants and the soon to be published book, The Knack: How Street-Smart Entrepreneurs Learn To Handle Whatever Comes Up. We discuss how small company’s can make an impact in the marketplace. Even though large company’s get most of the attention, there are more small company’s than enterprises. Each one matters to our economy.
You are a company, so much of this interview should inspire you to be small but think large!
Do you feel that small companies should get just as much attention as enterprises?
If, by enterprises, you mean large, publicly traded companies, I do think they receive much too much attention. They constitute a tiny fraction of all the companies in the world, and what applies to them doesn’t necessarily apply to any other business. We ignore the rest of the business universe at our loss, if not our peril.
Which extraordinary privately held companies have you encountered, while working at Inc.?
More than I can name. The most extraordinary, I would say, has been Springfield Remanufacturing Corp. (now SRC Holdings Corp.) in Springfield, Mo., although I’d also have to include some of the companies in Small Giants as well as other small giants I’ve met since the book appeared, such as Joie de Vivre Hospitality in San Francisco and Gainesville Health & Fitness in Gainesville, FL. (See the August 2008 cover story of Inc.)
What characteristics do each of these companies share?
They share the characteristics I write about in Small Giants–close ties to their communities; personal, intimate relationships with customers; warm, people-oriented cultures; passion for what they do and determination to be the best; having higher goals than growing for growth’s sake; great management. I could go on.
How have you built your personal brand, first with writing for a magazine and then authoring a book?
I’ve never thought of what I was doing as building a personal brand. It just happened. I focused on figuring out what I could do to earn a living that I would find rewarding and fun. In the end, I realized that my calling was to share with other people what I was learning from the great businesses and great businesspeople I had the privilege of meeting.
What is the craziest entrepreneurship story you’ve ever heard? How did he or she end up succeeding?
- Joe Cirulli of Gainesville Health & Fitness started with 12 cents to his name and now runs what is widely regarded as the best fitness business in the world.
- Jack Stack and 12 other managers at Springfield Remanufacturing began with $100,000 they managed to scrounge up among themselves and $8.9 million they borrowed to buy the assets with which they launched their business. This was like buying a $900,000 house with a downpayment of $10,000. They had an 89-to-1 debt-to-equity ratio. Banks get nervous if the ratio is worse than 2-to-1. Companies don’t survive at 89-to-1. Yet SRC not only survived but prospered. Today it’s a $450 million, employee-owned, mini-conglomerate.
But you know something? Many, very startups are a minor miracle, filled with lots of crazy things. It’s probably wrong to single out any one of them as crazier than the rest.
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Bo Burlingham is the author of Small Giants: Companies That Choose To Be Great Instead of Big (Portfolio, 2006) and an editor-at-large of Inc. magazine. Before joining Inc., he freelanced for various publications, including Esquire, Harper’s, Boston Magazine, and Mother Jones. He subsequently wrote two books with Jack Stack, the co-founder and CEO of Springfield Remanufacturing Corp. and the pioneer of open-book management. One of the books, The Great Game of Business (Doubleday/Currency, 1992), has sold more than 300,000 copies.
