What do you do when you have a great idea but don’t know where to start?  For instance, you may be really excited about your idea to start brewing your own jasmine tea or making organic marshmallows, but the idea just stops right there.  Then what?  How do you take your idea from the drawing board to a real live operation?  I’ve often wondered about this myself, as I constantly pitch ideas to my husband and friends.  But an article in the Small Business section of Fortune magazine about the granola company Bear Naked shows that it may be as simple as going shopping at your local grocery store.

Two friends, Kelly Flatley and Brendan Synnott, started Bear Naked, which makes natural granola products, in 2002.   In Fortune Small Business, Flatley and Synnott describe how they took this simple idea and developed it into a multi-million dollar business.  How did these two twentysomethings start out?  They did the same thing we do all the time.  They went to Costco.  But instead of dropping hundreds of dollars on tubs of spinach tip for their personal consumption, they invested in the business.  Flatley and Synnott scooped up granola ingredients like bags of nuts and gallons of honey and canola oil, so much that they scored Costco’s customer of the month title in fall 2003.  Flatley and Synnott also recall that they were the accountants, distributors, kitchen cleaners, and the cooks for their product.  After five scrappy years, they grew the brand so well that it reached $65 million in sales in 2007.  Even better, the Bear Naked brand caught the eye of Kellogg, which bought the company last year for a whopping $60 million.  Although the money is good, Flatley and Synnott describe themselves as proud parents of the brand, noting that with the sale to Kellogg, Bear Naked granola can reach an even wider audience. 

Bear Naked epitomizes how perserverance and a belief in your own product can take your company to dizzying heights.  It’s also a real-world example of how starting a company doesn’t have to involve fancy business plans or Silicon Valley venture capitalists.  It can be as simple as taking that baby step of going to Costco and mixing up a batch of your Mom’s secret recipe.