The Customer-Funded Business: Start, Finance, or Grow Your Company with Your Customers' Cash

About the Research

The research journey of which this book is a part began during my sabbatical in 2000 at London Business School. There, freed to think and study for several months, I sought to identify what I hoped would be a better and more disciplined way to assess entrepreneurial opportunities, in an effort to nudge the needle downward on the entrepreneurial failure rate. Fortunately, that research bore fruit in my “seven domains” framework, developed in The New Business Road Test, first published in 2003, with new updated editions published in 2006, 2010, and 2013.

In time, my work applying the seven domains framework with hundreds of entrepreneurs led me to dig deeper into business models, especially those that spurred real breakthroughs in their industries—like Southwest and Ryanair in airlines and Zara in apparel retailing. Once again, a book, Getting to Plan B, co-authored with Randy Komisar, was the happy result.

In researching the companies whose stories are told in Getting to Plan B, and in my ongoing work with growth-minded entrepreneurs and other business leaders who instinctively understand that cash flow—not profit—lies at the heart of most business breakthroughs, I became further intrigued with companies profiled therein like Dow Jones and Costco, whose working capital models lay at the heart of their continued success. “How might even better working capital models be constructed?” I wondered. “And, if they're constructed well enough, might they enable entrepreneurs ...