Most business books cover what it takes for large businesses to get even larger. Very few have covered what it takes to go from $0 to $1 billion in revenues. David Thomson, a former McKinsey consultant, has remedied that.

It’s interesting that for those companies rapid growth started after they hit a threshold of $50 million in annual revenues. Their sales soared from there reaching $1 billion rapidly: 4 years for eBay and Google and 6 years for Starbucks.

He identifies the same seven traits that these businesses share.

You can read the article in Fortune Small Business at:
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fsb/fsb_archive/2006/05/01/8376202/index.htm