The UnStoppables: Tapping Your Entrepreneurial Power

Chapter 8

The UnStoppable Six

How to Run a Billion-Dollar Business or a Start-Up the Rackspace Way (in about an Hour)

EVERY BILLION-DOLLAR BUSINESS begins as a scrappy small business.

Rackspace once had 3 employees. Now it has 5,000. Watching something that starts so simple and straightforward turn into a global enterprise so big and complex furnishes another insight that underlies just about everything in this book.

The insight is this: The core of any business, the original heart and soul that first allowed you to succeed with customers, never really changes for companies that stay vibrant and relevant, no matter how big they get. Inside that billion-dollar corporation, the value equation you first discovered is still just as simple—and most important, it needs to be, if you want to keep going and growing. The selling proposition that made them choose to buy from you—the values, the dream, the reason the market needed you—is still the foundation of it all. The idea you stand for must be reaffirmed by the decisions you make and actions you take every day.

This truth is as important to you as a start-up as it is for the biggest companies. And it’s based on an immutable concept called the Piper Cub Principle.

THE PIPER CUB PRINCIPLE

This little rule should boost your faith in what’s possible at any stage of growth because it applies in so many areas—from building things to operating things to designing things or just understanding in general. I heard it from an airline pilot who ...