5 High Risk, High Reward Steps to Starting Your Dream Company

So, you want to start a company? That’s a very exciting decision. But first, you must cover all your bases.

For instance, generate a clear and simple idea, then determine what industry or market you plan to target, what type of corporate organization you’ll implement and where your business will be located.

Each is an important decision, but the main consideration when starting a company is how to manage risk. Risk is the heart of entrepreneurship — defined as “the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled.” Risk is the sole determinant whether you will succeed or fail.

Billionaire Sir Richard Branson follows a principle called “protecting the downside,” which means that by looking at any situation and determining all options before making a decision, one can identify the worst case scenario and work backwards from there to find the optimal route forward. Protecting the downside is all about identifying and understanding risk.

Here are five risky steps that will actually help protect the downside of a new company and, counter-intuitively, set you up for success.

5 Things Business Owners Can Learn from Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs died more than a month ago, and the media has gone through its two stages of grief: Deification, followed by a backlash to the deification.

The latter was hastened by the publication of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs bio, which presented a warts-and-all version of the Apple founder that contrasted with the airbrushed image that emerged from obituaries.

By now, many are grappling with the contradictions of the more fleshed-out and realistic Steve Jobs, but also attempting to learn from the Steve Jobs story. Many might be wondering if it’s possible to emulate some of what Jobs achieved without the pettiness and obsessiveness. Of course, we’ll never know, but when reading over Isaacson’s bio and reviewing Jobs’ achievements, it is possible to pull out what seem to be transferable traits, ideas and attitudes. Below are five such attributes that any business owner can embrace, even if they don’t have Jobs’ one-in-a-billion eye for design or mercurial personality.