See this video from Business Insider for a reality check on the recent Facebook and Twitter valuations. The interviewee warns that those valuations may be excessively high. Whatever your opinion on the topic in question, I see an important takeaway for small businesses: it all comes down to dollars and cents. Even if, unlike the speaker says, the valuations of these companies are spot on, he raises the important issue of style vs. substance in the world of business.
Countless small firms have great, profitable ideas, but it can be difficult to see that value in a realistic framework, especially if positive confirmation from the market and from investors has accrued in spades. The entire dot-com bubble was born out of this kind of disconnect between style and substance. Chances are your small business has real value, and so does the idea underlying it, but if that initial seed of potential isn't watered with the adequate attention to detail (i.e. the "boring" stuff like cutting costs or marketing), and a commitment to an objective reckoning with its limitations, it will never realize it. A small businessperson shouldn't allow anyone to know the limitations of his/her own firm better than them.
