My New Year’s Resolution

I wish you all a happy 2010, dear readers!

I was reflecting back on 2009, and thinking what would be a good synthesis of the work I have been doing, and how I might succinctly summarize a New Year’s resolution for myself. Here is what I have come up with:

Through the Entrepreneur Journeys project, I have come to conclude that the most vulnerable phase in an entrepreneur’s life is the pre $1 million revenue stage. This is where numerous ventures fail. Once the $1 million revenue milestone is crossed, entrepreneurs find it easier to find additional customers, manage working capital, and access funding, whether it is credit or equity.

In my roundtables, the vast majority of entrepreneurs I work with are in this rather vulnerable pre $1 million revenue stage.

Thus, I have come to the conclusion that if I could help a million entrepreneurs globally reach $1 million in revenue (and beyond), that would be the foundation of a robust, distributed, and sustainable economic value creation that would add up to a trillion dollars in global GDP. It would also result in creating at least 10 million jobs around the world.

Through my efforts — blog, books, columns, roundtables — I am trying to develop a scalable entrepreneurship education system that entrepreneurs from every corner of the world can access. I am sure, in 2010, this work will gain further momentum.

But I do need your help in getting the word out that this resource base is available for entrepreneurs who wish to access it. Each of you — if you believe in this vision — can directly or indirectly influence, perhaps, another hundred entrepreneurs, and help them clear the all-important $1 million revenue hurdle. By using bootstrapping, crisp positioning, and laser-sharp focus, entrepreneurs can, each in their individual domains, build small businesses with solid foundations.

Beyond that, depending on how large the market opportunity is, they can scale to their potential, with or without external investment. Some will scale up to $10 million a year, some will scale to $50 million. And a small percentage of these venture may even scale to a billion dollars.

Most importantly, however, the base of a million small ventures needs to be robust and sustainable.

And in building that base, I invite your participation and leadership.

So, the synthesis of our mission is to build a scalable entrepreneurship education system that can support a trillion dollars of sustainable global GDP and 10 million jobs.

Note: This 2010 New Year’s Resolution has led us to the One Million by One Million (1Mby1M) global initiative. For me, it has been one of the most meaningful resolutions ever. With 1Mby1M, we now have a framework for Capitalism 2.0. Next up: Execution.