One of the problems I often see as entrepreneurs try to bring their ideas to fruition is a problem with scale.  Just because GM works with however many hundred thousand employees (or maybe it doesn’t?) that doesn’t mean it will work equally well with you and two high school kids in your garage. Now, I’m not saying you and two high school kids couldn’t do it in your garage.  What I’m saying is you and your friends would not be able to do it profitably.

The same holds true the other direction.  You have a successful business that involves you and your young friends.  You want to grow the business to the size of GM.  Can you do it?  Sometimes, sure.  But not always. Scientists understand this principle perfectly.  They do experiments on a small scale (for obvious reasons) and then try to scale up.  Often, what worked miraculously at the small scale fails huge when scaled up.

So as you look at your business, ask yourself this question:  Is this failing because of scale (or anything like that?)  Or, if the business is succeeding, ask, “Can we effectively scale this project up?”  Then the whys and why nots.  If you do that, you’ll save yourself a lot of grief.  Because many times, the problems we face are not problems of viability, they’re problems of scalability.