Tasty Crumbs

A strategy for business development

Introduction

The purpose of this blog is to introduce you to the tasty crumb strategy. This is the strategy that I used to build my business. I was able to make millions of dollars while being my own boss.

My company peaked at $20 million a year and it was generating a 25% net profit. The net profit was split amongst four partners. That’s not a bad living. It also had the potential to grow much larger. However, I decided to take the money off the table and lockdown financial independence for the rest of my life. Tasty crumbs can be very satisfying.

The Big Table in the Sky

I have always imagined that there’s this gigantic table in a castle somewhere high up in the sky. There are Giants dressed in 18 century garb feasting at this table. They’re gorging themselves and crumbs are falling off the table all over the floor.

The Giants represent the global elite corporations. This would include Cisco, Microsoft, Amazon, and all the other behemoth organizations. They’re all sitting around the table, eating like pigs and fighting over big pieces of cake.

My company’s job was to pick up the big crumbs that were on the floor. These crumbs represent businesses and services that were not big enough , too difficult to commoditize, the market was too small or it was too early in the adaptation cycle for the crumb droppers. .

The following is two examples of the crumbs that I picked up. They turned into really nice lines of business for me.

Cruise Line Calling Cards

I met at the telecommunications director for Princess Cruise lines at a trade show. He told me about a problem he had with crew calling. I listened to him and said I had a potential solution. We scheduled a meeting to discuss the solution.

This was a crumb because it was not a typical activity that one of the large players in the industry had a ready-made solution for. They had all the piece parts, but they had not integrated them in a way that met this client needs. My company was able to provide an integrated solution that made that solved the problem while increasing the Princesses company profitability and lowering crew cost of calling.

Princess cruise line was acquired by Carnival Cruise lines. I was afraid that we were going to lose the business. However, our program was so unique and effective the Carnival Cruise Lines adopted it for their entire fleet.

The basic problem was that Carnival ship board employees are primarily from outside of the United States. They spent a lot of time at sea, and they like to communicate with their families. However, the existing systems was costly and inefficient .The vendors providing the service were satellite companies with very little telecommunications experience. Their product was expensive, difficult to manage and could not meet the volume demands.

The system had to be able to route 10 million calls from over 100 ships stationed throughout the world to over 50 different countries. Each crewmen could purchase a debit card from a machine on the ship and use it to make calls home. The satellite providers routed to call to our gateways and then we applied the debit card logic and distributed the call. We were able to do this more efficiently because we integrated open source debit code logic with Cisco gateways and a variety of different telecommunications carriers. We automated the system to the point that it functioned smoothly and we had very little overhead. The system became obsolete with the introduction of Skype and all of the other VoIP services. However, we made a lot of money for a long time on this project.

Multi Site Medium Sized Business

As a result of the carnival cruise line business, we ended up with multiple connections to various carriers. This included voice, Internet and MPLS. I discovered that there were quite a few businesses that had between three and 10 domestic or international locations. It really helped when they had international locations, because we had a global footprint. These accounts did not generate enough revenue to entice the big MPLS players to provide anything beyond their basic services. End user technical staffs often did not have network engineers. The routing and switching on this kind of service can get complicated and requires some very specific talents.

Since we had multiple Internet connections into multiple carriers, we could create a cost-effective network by combining MPLS offerings from various carriers into a bundle package. We also had the ability to design all the routing and switching components verified single point of contact 24 hour service. We overlaid unified communication services over the network and provided hosting capabilities for their servers.

The combination of technical ability with our network gave us the ability to support these needs. The big companies didn’t really care since we were using their underlying services anyway. This gave us a market in which we had significant competitive advantages and the large competitors were happy with us doing the first line, customer support and design while they provided the wholesale services.

Crumbs keep Dropping

We were able to build a profitable $20 million year business with this strategy. The strategy does not preclude your ability even grow more. If you pick up enough crumbs, you can build a cake that can attract investment or acquisition from the larger companies. I started too late , did not build to scale in the beginning and did not have the knowledge of the capital markets to really expand the business beyond that level. I was 60 when I sold the company and decided to take all the risk off the table. Therefore, I never became Bill Gates, but I became financially independent and I’m living a pretty good life.

I believe this strategy opens up even more opportunities today. The artificial intelligence hype is generating gigantic crumbs. There are multiple large companies sitting at the table, gorging and fighting over the gigantic triple layer AI cake cake. There are crumbs falling all around the table.

There’s so much hype about artificial intelligence right now that most small and medium size businesses do not really know how to implement it into their business. There are a lot of pieces that need to be integrated to really make it work. Everything from ensuring that documentation is acceptable for training to understanding how to connect to the large language, models and create AI agents. This is going to require a high level of integration skills and specific talents that will not be generally available in most businesses. If you can figure out a turnkey product that provides the small business infrastructure for adapting artificial intelligence, you will be snacking on crumbs all the way to the bank.

Also, due to the adaptation of SaaS and cloud services the capital requirements for starting a business are reduced. I believe that I could’ve started Equivoice with 15% of the capital that was originally required. I also could’ve expanded it without having to scrape along for the capital to put in the improvements. Our long term growth was impeded by the constant need to raise capital to expand our network infrastructure. The ability to use cloud based and software as a means service sign significantly reduces these capital requirements.

Crumb Criteria

Here are some of the characteristics of crumbs

1. They are usually products and services that are being adapted by larger companies and are in the process of being implemented in the small business area.

2. They services which require integration of multiple vendors

3. They are markets that are not large enough for the major players to compete aggressively yet offer good revenue opportunities for smaller integrators

4. They are vertical applications specific to industries that can create interesting revenue streams that are not quite large enough to be pursued by a large company.

5. They are services that requires specialized technical skills that are not generally available to the average IT person.

6. Companies that prefer to deal with smaller companies because they have more leverage and are tired of being treated like commodities by some of the larger players

7. Opportunities in which your buying power for specific services allows you to make a margin when selling them. For example, we had a very large monthly network bill that gave us discounts well beyond the actual size of our company was. We were able to target companies that were in the five to $10,000 a month range and offer them significant savings.

These are a few of the criteria that I used. If you apply this to your own industry, you may be able to adapt them or find your own.

Summary

If you have a creative mind and the ability to analyze opportunities, then this may be a good strategy for you. For example, if I were starting a business today, I would create an artificial intelligence integration company. The company would analyze documentation for its appropriateness for AI agents, provide integration API services into multiple LLMs, connect to agent platforms, help analyze the business case and provide other ongoing services. I do not believe that you need heavy duty machine learning and artificial intelligence engineers. You do need people that understand the concepts and have a the ability to understand how the overall system works. The beauty of this model is that the heavy duty work such as training the model are done by the crumb droppers.

This is just one idea for crumb snatching. There are many across many industries. Since I grew up in information technologies, I know how to find those crumbs. This strategy gives you the choice of adapting a lifestyle business that can make you a good living or giving you the opportunity to go into crazy growth mode. Although I never got into the crazy growth mode I made him enough money to live really well and I did not have a boss.