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balancing the elements within the business idea The

contrast between Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos and Darryl Mattocks, the
founder of the Internet Bookshop, also illustrates the power of the
evaluation and planning steps to continue to shape the idea and ensure
that all elements of the business idea are in balance.

Bezos’ vision for an online business was truly global. He recognised
that the two criteria critical to achieving this vision – size of product
range and ease of computer-enabled customer selection – would mean
that the fixed costs of his visionary business would be very high, while
the ongoing variable costs would be very low. As a result, Bezos
articulated an early strategic objective for Amazon.com as GBF – Get
Big Fast. His financial background gave him the confidence that he
could assemble the financial backing required to deliver that strategy.

While Darryl Mattocks may have had a similar grand vision, he perhaps
lacked the extreme personal drive and the access to finance enjoyed by
Bezos. Because UK venture capitalists saw little potential in the
internet and refused to back him, Mattocks depended on a loan of
around £50,000 from the Blackwell family, together with the working
capital he could generate from his credit card. Mattocks had no option
but to scale his Internet Bookshop operations accordingly.

variation on the theme of GBF A further variation on the

themes of GBF and achieving harmony among the business idea
elements throughout the idea evaluation step is provided by Body
Shop. Anita and Gordon Roddick realised that the criterion of
protecting their innovative but relatively easy-to-copy retail concept
was best addressed by getting big fast and achieving national coverage.
Given their limited financial resources, they selected franchising as a
low-cost method of achieving GBF, thereby ensuring that all aspects of
their business idea remained in balance.

two-phase screening process Evaluating business ideas

typically follows a two-phase process, with a coarse-screen exercise
followed by a more detailed, finer-screened evaluation of those ideas
which survive the first phase.

We saw in Chapter 3 how Jeff Bezos generated a list of around 20
product areas which appeared to offer the potential to succeed on the
internet, including videos, computer hardware and software. He then