Crappy to Good

This blog has been years in the making. I think the idea first hit me when I was reading Good to Great by Jim Collins for the first time. My friend, Chuck Sharp, and I had been slaving away trying to get our company Sharp Analytics off the ground. Chuck and I were reading “Good to Great” hoping that it would provide us with some much-needed insights into our strategy. I loved the book but I was pretty disappointed when I came across this sentence:

Pitney Bowes had grown to over 30,000 employees and revenues in excess of $4 billion, compared to the sorry remnants of Addressograph, which had less than $100 million and only 670 employees. (Good to Great, Jim Collins, 70)

So here we were trying to figure out how to cross the $1 million per year in revenue threshold, reading a book that describes $100 million in annual revenue as “sorry remnants.” We probably would have killed for those remnants.

I remember walking straight into Chuck’s office and pointing out that as much as I liked Collins’ Good to Great we needed the prequel, Crappy to Good. And that’s where this idea started. I started looking for resources for startups and found very little. While you can apply the concepts in Good to Great to a crappy business, it just isn’t the same as if the book had actually been written for an entrepreneur who is dying to figure out how to make his or her crappy business a good one.

I’d like Crappy to Good to become a blog that engages startup entrepreneurs in a discussion about what it takes to turn our crappy businesses into good businesses. Because seriously, if we are going to describe $100 million in revenue as merely “good” then I’m the proud owner of a really great crappy business. Help me make it a good one by joining in the conversation.