Want to Turn Huge Startup Profits? Here's Why You Need to Be Patient

What most entrepreneurs don't realize is that a new product takes a long, long time before it’s profitable. Figure about three years -- more than 1,000 days.

The last new product my company took on was a cloud-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application. The CRM application was developed by someone much smarter than me and we signed on as a partner to sell and implement the system. We added it to the mix of our existing CRM applications. I’ve done this before. And I’ve learned something: You don’t just add a new product. You invest in one.

For starters, the unlucky person in your company who you’ve volunteered to learn this new product will need to become an expert. This takes a long, long time. It requires sitting for certification exams, attending vendor classes, testing internally and then dipping your toes into the water with a new client, pretending you know what you’re doing, while you struggle to keep your own nausea under control. Because you don’t really know what you’re doing for a while. Becoming an expert in anything takes years, not months.

And becoming an expert requires money -- not just the fee you’re paying to the vendor for the privilege to sell their product (yes, if you can believe it, there is a fee). It’s the additional costs of the certification classes, the training, the seminars, the webinars and the partner conferences you’re required to attend. It’s the cost of time spent learning all this new stuff and the opportunity cost of that lost billable time. It’s the testing labs, the new server, the additional software that needs to be integrated that no one mentioned before.

Read more: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/229499