How To Grow A Well-Rounded Business

The companies on our annual Entrepreneur 360 list have mastered a balancing act.

- Matt McCue

CONSIDER THE WORD BUILD. It’s perhaps the most common verb in entrepreneurship—she built a business; he is building a business. But the word isn’t fair. You know what gets built? A building. The foundation is laid, the first floor is constructed, and then the first floor is forevermore the first floor: always solid, never changing, the foundation upon which a second floor and more can rise. Built.

Nothing about a business is like this. “What successful companies—for example, Amazon—do is to constantly search for something better for customers,” says Jeffrey A. Carr, a professor of marketing and entrepreneurship at New York University’s Stern School of Business. “It’s this never-ending betterment that has to happen.” And that betterment can’t happen all at once. A business is a collection of parts: revenue, marketing, sales, staffing, and so on. A founder may be better at some than others. Some are simply harder than others. But to be a well-rounded, 360-degree business, they all must thrive.

That means a business isn’t built, layer by perfected layer. It is grown, like a body. Its parts will change with time, and need constant upkeep. “It’s a continuous learning process,” says Andrew Zacharakis, director of the Babson College Entrepreneurship Research Conference. “The entrepreneur who tries to roll out everything in one neat package is striving for the impossible.”