One Man's Meat

For Charles Lubin, the minuscule market for Sara Lee products ws not chicken feed. It was enormous or at least promising. When it matured into large enough proportions, the expected happened. Sara Lee became big enough and was available at a high enough price earnings ratio to be a good buy for a competitor of the baking companies. The same has happened to Pepperidge Farm, to Basic System, to Spencer Gifts to play skool, to Diner's Club to Bomar,to Oklahoma Oil and to many others who helped change the commercial environment they entered with such modest beginnings, and often uniformed optimism.

A lot of new industries originate in pure ignorance. Ignorance and incompetence, sustained only by blind enthusiasm, are the pathology of business failure  One out of many succeeds. The fact that success is so rare and originates out of such a welter of unbusiness like attitudes and practices does not justify the conclusion that all success is serendipitous, accidental or without food for learning.

What we learn is, again, that all big businesses and big industries started small, that large markets do not suddenly, or at least not very often, materialize full blown. They start small and grow nig. Even such a massive and costly new business as Comcast will one day be viewed as having started awfully small.

The significance of an industry's bigness is not its size but now its size developed. To understand growth and capitalize on opportunity it is useful to look at the business world not in terms of what consumer do, by in terms of how they get to the point of doing it. While markets expand because more people or companies buy a product, what is more relevant to recognize is that more people buy because more of them have learned to think of that product as an appropriate, a useful, and a legitimate item of consumption.