Secret Strategies Of The Gurus: Guru 1 - Bill Gates As A Small
Business Entrepreneur
Introduction: Strategies are strategies. Dismiss for a moment
from your mind what some people are saying about Bill Gates's
offensive practices he used to transform himself from a small
business entrepreneur to a titan in the business world. There
are yet honest-to-goodness strategies we can glean from his
sleeves. We can study, learn from them and possibly apply them
in our own home based business. Upon this premise that this
article was written.
Strategy of Bill Gates - Have a Vision: At the outset, I will
lay down the results of my research on one secret strategy of
Bill Gates. He used the same strategy to jump-start his small
business to today's business behemoth. Based on my research, the
strategy of Bill Gates is grounded upon the following:
"Have a VISION of what you want to achieve and hold on to that
vision come wrath or high water."
His vision was:
"A Personal Computer on every desk."
By the way, I didn't want to use the grammatically correct
expression "come hell or high water" - for personal reason - so
excuse my grammatical preference. Anyway, let's go back to our
subject. When you have a vision, you can make the impossible
possible.
Almost everybody is familiar about how once upon a time the
small business entrepreneur Bill Gates secured mighty IBM's
contract to supply the latter's operating system. When he was
negotiating with the IBM people, he had no operating system as
yet. He was able to buy a Disk Operating System or DOS for $50
thousand. In the end, he got the contract. Why?
Bill Gates was guided by his vision - that every desk all over
the world should have a computer on it. This vision enabled him
to provide IBM with a DOS operating system and have control over
it including to whom he wanted it sold to.
Beginning Entrepreneur: Before he became an entrepreneur, Bill
Gates had nurtured the vision that software will one day rule
the world. During high school he spent many late nights with
friend Paul Allen tinkering with the school's computer system.
He dropped out of college after completing his junior year at
Harvard. Instead, he and his bosom friend Paul Allen set up a
small business - a software company - in far away New Mexico.
This move was in accordance with his vision.
His vision became clearer as he moved from a total newbie to one
with a small business to keep. His vision was clothed in clearer
terms, as he negotiated the DOS deal with IBM.
Better late than never: Bill Gates's company ultimately became
the leader in the software arena. During the first half of the
1990's - 1993 to be exact - he was among the last of the
software titans to acknowledge the future significance of the
Internet.
But once he did realize that indeed Internet was the wave of the
future, he had the tenacity to reshape his vision. His vision
retained its old flavor - that is, software dominance in
commerce, industry and in every field. It was rehashed in his
own words as follows:
"In the years ahead, the Internet will have an even more
profound effect on the way we work, live and learn