[anguslong]

Another way of saying same. If employees are in your future, focus on revenue per employee (RPE).

Napkin math: sub-$100k RPE and your wee company is nominally profitable after salaries, fixed & variable costs. Greater than $100k per employee, profits scale nicely.

While nice to talk about the Goog's RPE ($1 mil '08), I prefer to "fish" for company ideas a little closer to Earth. For inspiration, Inc 5000 companies with 50 or fewer employees, sorted by revenue:

http://www.inc.com/inc5000/2009/search_results.html?showrank...

[rgrieselhuber]

I agree on RPE, but the data on the Inc. website is highly suspect, however, with regard to number of employees.

I did a random sampling of several companies that had tons of revenue with just 1 or 2 employees and checked out their websites and the Inc. data is flat out wrong in many cases.

[wdewind]

http://www.healthport.com/management_overview.aspx

this company is listed as 3 employees on INC., there's 4 in their management section alone...seems INC maybe has PUBLICLY listed employees, and is not counting the chairman...