What's the opposite of "bootstrap" (in business)?
When starting a project or business, there are two extreme approaches. One is where you do everything yourself without external help: learn the techniques yourself, develop your own tools, providing your own capital. The other extreme would be to find as much external help as you can: consulting/hiring domain experts, using COTS solutions, looking for investors/partners.
Compared to the former, the latter tends to have less risk (for the founders), more capital cost, less retention of knowledge, less equity/control. The former, in certain forms, is sometimes called "bootstrapping". What would the latter be called?
Update: I think I've mislead folks due to poorly presenting this question as a straight-forward antonym request for bootstrap. Bootstrap has a specific meaning in finance, pertaining to the acquisition of capital without taking on external liabilities or equity. I'd like to know what's the opposite of a more general approach to growing a project or business, one which is better covered in this article: "Ben & Jerry's vs Amazon".
Here are some examples which better illustrate the dichotomy:
- Hiring consultants instead of employees
- Leasing a pre-furnished office space instead of building a new one
- Contracting out your IT management to a firm instead of growing in-house staff
I think mainly it's a money vs. time payoff but there are other side effects such as expertise, culture and so on.
Venture capital is the source of money from other people investing in your business, so "venture funded" would be the opposite of bootstrapped.
In business books it's often the Ben&Jerrys vs Amazon
It doesn't quite fit your examples, but a common term used is simply funded. If you are fully funded (by whatever means) there is no need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
Would "Turn-key" be the word or phrase you're looking for? It describes a business where you invest your funds to purchase a business that is "ready to go." In other words, you have paid someone to set it up for you, and all you do is step in at that point and run the business.
Consider "outsourcing" and "corner cutting."