Carl J. Schramm > Quotes

“Winning can’t be done without everyone working as a team, but deciding where the team is going devolves to one person. Successful companies have successful leaders, usually one each.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“knowing whether your startup will survive and then flourish generally takes from seven to ten years.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“Most startups, even those that are built on great ideas and successful execution, take a long time to bloom.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“Rather than selling stock to the public or being acquired by a big company, most startups continue to be owned by their founders long after ten years. From 2006 to 2016, an average of fewer than one hundred companies per year sold stock for the first time.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“Third, unless it is unavoidable, it is a mistake to use company ownership—such as shares, options, or other types of interests in the company—to compensate employees”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“As we’ve now seen time and again, the secret lies not in writing formal plans. Planning, however, is a critical skill for every successful entrepreneur.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“Changing focus early to exploit a better idea often is the best way to mitigate the risk of failing. This is yet another reason not to have investors involved with your company until you have found a scale opportunity to exploit. If you have no choice but to bring on investors, minimizing their control can be very difficult.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“Eighty percent of firms fail before getting to the magic ten-year mark when, on average, they become self-sustaining and begin to experience scale growth. Those that survive are seldom sold. Over ninety percent of twenty-year-old firms are still owned by their founders.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“Many entrepreneurs build scale businesses by owning many franchises. In fact, the majority of McDonald’s owners operate more than one franchise.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“About fifteen percent of all startups are created by company employees who find themselves in a spin-out situation, where an existing company chooses to dispose of a line of business that it has determined is no longer within their core mission or perhaps is not worthy of the additional investment needed to achieve real success and scale. Other employees, who become frustrated by their employer’s lack of support for an idea, product, or service that the employee believes could improve the company’s future, strike out on their own to turn that spurned idea into a new venture. And others, sometimes called discovery entrepreneurs, typically university scientists, start great companies using the new ideas that grew out of their years of research. The five-year success rates for spin-out and discovery entrepreneurs is about forty percent.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“For most of the previous century, opening a new store or starting a manufacturing company wasn’t much remarked upon. Starting a business wasn’t very noteworthy, mostly because there were many more individual stand-alone businesses, and many more being started. For example, nearly half the veterans returning from World War II eventually started companies. “Business owners”—not then known as entrepreneurs—were more common; your neighbor was much more likely to work for himself than he is today.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“This approach to planning suggests that entrepreneurs can achieve success by pursuing a linear, rational, critical path model, one completely unrelated to the spontaneous trial-and-error process that characterizes the inevitably messy early years of every startup. Planning is nothing more than an attempt to bring order to a process that is chaotic by nature, and plan writing a technique that provides structure to the academic exercise.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“Whichever kind of entrepreneur you may start out to be, including franchisees who buy fully developed business models and merchants whose first idea is just to open a single store, the chances are that you will become an innovator along the way. It is the very nature of business to solve problems in creative ways. Every entrepreneur seeks to make his product better, faster, and cheaper, to turn his store into a setting that will attract more customers, operate more efficiently, increase his profit, and build a more successful company.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“Another frequently mentioned cause of failure, conflict among the company’s founders, didn’t explain these failures either. Each was the leader of a pack of one. With no co-founders, they didn’t face internal conflict”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“Reality, however, is quite different. Data first collected by the Kauffman Foundation shows that about half of all entrepreneurs never went to college in the first place, and most do not start their companies until they are well along in their careers. The average entrepreneur is nearly forty years old when he launches and more than eighty percent of all new companies are started by people over thirty-five.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“The presumed strength of patent protection in the United States has been gradually eroding in the face of multiple challenges, including from foreign competitors whose home jurisdictions may not recognize U.S. patent validity. For a startup, protecting and defending against patent infringement can involve expensive litigation that can drag on for years, a kiss of death for a lean startup and a system that now operates in favor of large companies that can afford teams of expensive lawyers. Is there a better way to mitigate the risk of having your idea stolen? Increasingly the answer lies in developing your idea very carefully, testing markets as quietly as possible, and working through your startup’s production and distribution mechanisms in anticipation of an all-in start, one that makes clear your intent to own the market that your innovation is targeting.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“The chances of a venture-backed startup surviving five years, which is less than fifty percent, is the same as for all new companies, regardless of the source of funds.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“Consider that Rice University’s business plan competition—the Super Bowl of such contests—awards in some years as much as $3 million of prize money, mostly in the form of offers of capital from wealthy investors. More than a thousand entrepreneurs apply to compete, but only forty-four are invited to Houston for the finals. Tellingly, only about thirty-five percent of all winners of the Rice competition have ever started a company. What little follow-up data exists on other university competitions suggests that an even lower percentage of those contestants turn their plans into startups.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“An aspiring entrepreneur who spends a year in an incubator is no more likely to start a company than those entrepreneurs who skip the incubator and go directly about the business of organizing a new company. Because the culture of incubators is designed to be encouraging, supportive, and mostly uncritical, an aspiring entrepreneur can spend weeks and months working on ideas that previously have been tried and failed or that have little prospect for market appeal. In that environment, it seems less, not more, likely that an aspirant will confront the reality of business startups and redirect his energy to potentially more productive work.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“In fact, following the narrative’s prescriptions seems to produce the opposite of the intended result: As more business plans are written, and as more local ecosystems are created, the number of startup businesses continues to fall.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“An entrepreneur is someone who exploits an innovative idea—one that he develops, or copies, improves, or rents—to start a profit-seeking, scalable business that successfully satisfies demand for a new or better product.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“Basketball, she continued, was easy by comparison; “You practiced, played, and either won or lost.” As an entrepreneur, she said, the game just keeps going with no ending buzzer. “There’s no just getting through forty minutes.” Success requires nonstop, persistent innovations, and discipline, measured in years.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“For a somewhat more rarefied example, consider that the median age of a Nobel Prize winner is sixty-two, and that, with some exceptions, the prizes generally are awarded for work done in their forties.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“As you read this, about nine million Americans are thinking about starting a company. On average, they will kick the idea around for at least three years. Only about 500,000 will start new companies this year. Starting a business is an exciting prospect. Yet, as the numbers suggest, many shrink from choosing to become entrepreneurs.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“And then along came Henry Ford and the Wright brothers. These geniuses evolved the basic mechanics of the bicycle into new ways to speed travel. Ford’s quadricycle was really two bicycles joined by a platform that held a gasoline engine, itself newly developed for other purposes, and had room for a driver. The engine was connected to the vehicle’s wheels with bike chains. The Wrights, whose original business was building bicycles, invented the first airplane by mounting a gas engine on a winged airframe, connecting it to propellers with bike chains. The colossal influence of the bicycle cannot be understated. Today, successive inventions derived from bike technology account for at least one-fifth of the world’s economic activity. Steve Jobs said that the bike operated as a metaphor for discovery;”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“A franchise should be tested as an investment. Will the return on capital invested, plus the time and pressures of running this new business, pay off? As a general rule, a franchise should return at least fifteen percent profit every year after the first three years. Will your yield, after three years, be at least as much as if your money had been conservatively invested and you had continued to work regular hours at a regular job?”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“The president of a publicly traded company once told me, “Of course, we have a business plan. If an acquirer shows up, I’m ready. But, I keep it locked in my desk. If I circulated it inside the company, people would work toward its goals at the expense of seeing all the opportunities our customers keep presenting to us. And, I never want someone here to think that they would have to start their own company because we wouldn’t treat their idea as a potentially transformative innovation.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“Consider that companies started by the faculty and graduates of MIT alone, engineers and scientists, if measured in terms of aggregate sales, would represent the world’s seventeenth largest economy.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“Garmin, a combination of their first names, introduced its first product a year later, at the 1990 Marine Technology Exposition in Chicago. The GPS 100, a navigation aid for ships, was an instant success. They left the convention with five thousand orders and a conviction that their next product should be geared to a mass consumer market.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

“New franchises account for nearly forty percent of all new business started each year. Success among strong franchises such as Jimmy John’s sandwiches, Sport Clips Haircuts, and Auntie Anne’s pretzels is very high. Nearly everyone who owns one of the two hundred strongest franchised brands succeeds: Five-year survival rates are over ninety-five percent.”
― Carl J. Schramm, Burn the Business Plan: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do