As many of you know many multi-national, billion dollar corporations such as Amazon, Apple, Disney, Google, Harley Davidson, HP, Mattel, Microsoft, Dell and Nike among many other giants all started by previously unknown genius founders from incredibly humble beginnings of simple garage operations and became unimaginable successful. But what are the factors to this success, is it all that simple?

Basically there a three factors, let’s take a deeper dive….

 

The workplace (garage)

The workplace (garage)Be thoughtful that the garage is a place where you feel home, protected and empowered to do experimenting. It is a place with limited boundaries and minimal exposure. Also you decide to change or move the interior to any way you like to optimize your work.The obvious function of a garage is to protect whatever is inside from the environment. But the existence of the garage suggests that there is enough wealth available to support a fairly large non-essential space to experiment with ideas and even do small scale production. A garage also comes with a house that includes amenities that support the business. A typical garage we're talking about in itself is larger than what most families on Earth live in as their primary space. Having a garage is a huge luxury if we look at it from a global perspective.We should not forget that the value of the garage also comes from the safe neighborhood which allows business founders to work on their projects without the danger of their inventions and small profits taken away by criminals or competitors. A neighborhood where private property and inventions are respected is a huge invisible value and unfortunately is not present in many parts of the World.In an ever wider scope the garage business can only survive if the laws of the country support such initiatives in general. If you're not allowed to tinker and sell your stuff without going through complicated bureaucratic systems to set-up expensive companies and pay all kinds of hidden taxes, you can say good-bye to any start-up. Start-up experimentation requires freedom of business.

Time, Money and Resources

A garage business requires the founders to have enough free time to develop their idea. Most adults especially in families with small children work at least 12 hours a day, sometimes in several jobs, to earn a living. They have no or very little spare time to learn or create anything new.When you are building a startup in your garage, you must have enough savings to support not only your business expenses no matter how small they are, but also your own living expenses between the time you start working full time at your business and the time the operation starts making enough revenue to provide you with profits you can live off. This typically takes at least 1-3 years, but can last up to a decade. So you have to be persisted.We must also note that most garage start-up founders have access to high quality education and/or acquiring important skills at a premier company of some kind. They typically also have access to people in key positions or with specialized skills to work with. But it will be tempting for these resources to join the quest. Since the workplace, the concept and the motivation to start experimenting in a garage is fun and challenging.

The intrinsic motivation

Most importantly the right motivation is key. It is the passion, believe and right energy to chase dreams and to do what you like most. But there is more to it…The founders must belong to the middle-class to begin with so they can have an incentive to become successful, celebrated and wealthy from their business.If you take all this into account, the idea of starting a business in a garage becomes less readily available than one would first think. It's basically open for people who can afford a house in a fairly wealthy neighborhood, have good education and work experience, have freely available funds, have enough inspiration and motivation to extract other resources and have much free time on their hands. Such conditions exist for a significant number of people in the developed world, but it's almost non-existent in poor nations. No wonder that most garage operations are from North America and to a smaller extent from Europe.