You may find yourself wondering why I'm suggesting you should aim to be like Royal Crown Cola. I believe RC Cola to be a fitting metaphor. Startups historically have messy paths to success, and in that trail is usually a rich and interesting history of how the company came to exist. This is true of Royal Crown Cola.

It is easy to get caught up in the excitement and think you will become an overnight success and will be the top performer of your industry. The truth is overnight success usually takes time and patience. This is my point for modeling yourself after Royal Crown Cola. Usually startups begin from an existing frustration. This is true of RC Cola, who created an offshoot cola because of a disagreement with a Coca-Cola bottler over price. Coca-Cola even waged assult after assult with lawsuits prohibiting Royal Crown's usage of "cola" on their beverage. Royal Crown Cola was indeed a scrappy pioneer creating the first diet cola before its larger rivals arrived in that market.

I think many lessons can be learned from RC Cola.

• Pursue Your Dream - Starting a company because you believe you can create a better product or value, is a fantastic goal to encourage your happiness and satisfaction.
• Change Is Constant - Over the course of years and decades RC Cola renamed the entire company multiple times to focus around its key brand in that period.
• Being Number One Isn't Everything - Coca-Cola and Pepsi are both vastly larger by marketshare and brand value than RC Cola, but that hasn't stopped RC Cola from making their product or money. They are the third largest national cola, and that isn't a bad thing.
• Innvoation Disrupts Itself - RC Cola was the first company to successfully market a diet cola (beating Coke and Pepsi). This was a fantastic feat of inguinity and they own the entire diet market until the artificial sweetner was banned by the government for use. They had to start their diet line from scratch, this leveled the playing field.
• Bought & Sold - RC Cola has had several different owners: DWG Corporation, Triarc Companies, Inc., Cadbury Schwepps and current is held by Dr. Pepper Snapple Group. Startups are bought and sold frequently mirroring this long string of events.

Clearly Being Number One Isn't Everything. I want you to think for a minute, when is the last time you saw an advertisement for Royal Crown Cola (RC Cola) on television, in a magazine or heard about it on the radio? At least in the United States, I cannot think of the last time. Why is this significant? Because we are constantly bombarded by Coca-Cola and Pepsi advertisements, everywhere. I would say Coca-Cola advertises more frequently, but it could just be how I am perceiving them.

The difference in RC Cola, I feel is their positioning. I think they have a solid product and I think they let it sell itself for the most part. Think how much higher profit RC Cola must be on its sales to advertising ratio than Coca-Cola. RC Cola is really not spending tens or hundreds of millions of dollars advertising. Sure, you may argue they are also not making as much money, and that is true. But consider they still exist and are still the third largest regular cola nationally.

This is an extremely encouraging fact for startups taking on giant rivals such as Microsoft, Google, Amazon and others. You may not ever completely displace your larger rivals, but you can still survive and thrive as a great company with a rich history. Keeping that in mind, I would argue Royal Crown Cola should be the defacto beverage of startup companies.