Don't be first only to come in last

A great company usually starts with a great idea -- one that's slightly ahead of it's time. Being first in your world with a new product or service gives you a tremendous advantage over potential competitors. You have the opportunity to define the market and become the brand name. You can also get a jump on sales before anyone else knows what hit them. Unfortunately, being first isn't necessarily a complete recipe for success. If you don't capitalize on your position quickly, you risk being overtaken by others who make better use of your idea.

Leverage people who influence others

So what's the fastest way to go about creating a successful business out of a good idea? It should come as no surprise that there's already a model out there that makes sense in a lot of cases. If you dust off one of the 13 copies of Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point that your friends sent to you when it came out, you'll see that the main idea behind the book is really quite useful to entrepreneurs. That is, you can create a positive business "epidemic" by using a few people who have influence in your market. This goes contrary to the "spray and pray" approach used by most businesses who are trying to make a big splash in their markets, but it is really how most successful business strategies unfold quickly -- whether by design or not.

Tailor the strategy to your business objectives

The trick in creating a tipping point for your business is adapting the tactics to your specific target. Perhaps you need to look at creating small epidemics at first. You can apply the model in selling to individual organizations as well as to broader markets. The ideas scale pretty well, but you need to think hard about what you are really trying to accomplish. Once you have a localized tipping point, you can compound your efforts to spread the epidemic more widely. It's all about selecting the right people to get you there.

It's not necessarily about money

Money helps, of course. There are a lot of good reasons to have money on hand for your business. However, if your plan is to raise a ton of cash to fund initial sales and marketing efforts, you may want to think again. As Gladwell points out, a small input is enough to get an epidemic started. That means that you can create a lot of change with very limited resources. In a very real sense, you are just wasting money if you throw too much of it at the problem. There are some things that money can't buy. So save your MasterCard for changing the way people think and finding a way to influence their behavior. That's the key to introducing new products and penetrating new markets.