I am preparing my class on Starting A Small Business that I teach at New York University several times a year, and found this great metaphor (Kaplan, Patterns of Entrepreneurial Management,Wiley) about the small business and the spider web.

The skills needed to successfully run a small business with few resources are significantly different than those needed to be successful in a large corporation; and executives who left corporate jobs and are starting businesses will find that they need to look at their new business more like a spider web than a castle.

In the early stages, small businesses are fragile like a spider web, where loss of one or two of the main strands can result in the loss of the entire web. The corporation, however, is more like a castle with strong protection. The start-up has no legal department, marketing department, separate sales team, or someone to call when the computers stop talking with one another, except perhaps themselves. The start-up small business owner has to do it all at first, and often with no experience being a multitasking, always-on-duty spider!