Blake Mycoskie, Chief Shoe Giver at TOMS says the key to their success is a lack of resources. “Being comfortable can hurt your creative entrepreneurial spirit. An early and unearned sense of security can be the worst thing that can happen to a business. If you have a little money and have to bootstrap and improvise to pull things together, that becomes embedded in your company’s DNA forever – so as you scale up, you maintain the frugality and the efficiency that helped you survive your earliest days. For instance, now that TOMS is an established, successful business, we could throw resources around with a little less care than we used to, but we don’t . We still emphasize creative problem-solving and are scrupulous with our expenditures. Out culture is lean and mean – well, maybe not mean. But being creative and resourceful are skills we honed in our hungry days, and they are just as useful now. It’s an impulse that can lead to extraordinary success.”

-From his book Start Something That Matters

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