Re: Some truth about investment and growth
Don't confuse company growth with product offering growth. The two are not necessarily the same thing. If your product offering gets too wide and you can't keep each product busy enough, you will be in much worse shape than a company that specializes in one thing and does it well. If you want a great real life example of that, look at what Apple did in the 90's. They had expanded their product offerings very thin. They had over 100 products available for sale, with computers, servers, printers, scanners, etc. but weren't selling enough of any of them to make a profit. So they cut back to 4 items. Yes, they only had 4 product lines for quite a while. With that focus, they were able to get way better at what they do and obviously, the profit began to happen. Now, since then, they have adapted and expanded quite a bit, but it took that focus to know what their company actually was to make it happen.
With sound companies, the same thing can be true. Define your target market. Set up a budget. Make it work with as little gear as practical. Before expanding into a new market, make sure you can make it work on paper before buying any gear. That's how capitalists capitalize. I wish I'd have done that earlier on. It would have saved me a fortune.
