Success.

I feel like there shouldn’t be too much in common between the steel and wheat industries, but, when I think about it, they – and, really, all businesses – have at least one thing invariably in common: pursuit of success.

Sounds fine and dandy in theory, but the problem is that success is just so elusive. Just starting a business is problem enough; I mean, really – hitting on an idea and finding interested colleagues is already a fantastic hurdle.

Not to mention, even you’re lucky enough to get the ball rolling, most start-ups don’t exactly have the funds to rent an office, purchase furnishings, buy tons of “necessary” software, or . . . well. Do all too much of anything, really.

The solution?

Ditch it. All of it.

Forget the office, forget the fax machine, forget the expensive project managers and teleconferencing software – for start-up companies, it’s just too much.

And many new firms are beginning to take note of this – that bragging about your office sounds nice, but driving there every morning is more trouble (and gas money) than it’s worth – and that none of these expensive teleconferencing and project manager software offer anything to the average start-up that they can’t find in Skype or Google Wave, both of which are free, cross-platform options open to any entrepreneur.

It’s not that we’re settling by choosing the free option, or being miserly by not setting up a physical location. It’s just that renting out an office isn’t just a waste of money; it’s a huge blow to efficiency – and efficiency is absolutely essential the success of a start-up.

Just think about it for a second. If you do decide to rent an office, the only time you’ll ever be productive is when you’re in it. You’ll have to stop your work every time someone walks in with a stupid question – and, worse, you’ll actually have to answer it. You might end up with a landlord that varies your rent along with his mood. All that on top of the fact that the drive there is just one long waste of time and gas money and you have what works out to be, more or less, a recipe for failure.

Enter the home office. Every one of us at Toufiq Media works at home; not one of us has ever paid a cent for the software we use to collaborate; and all of us are exponentially more efficient therefore.

Whenever we need to hold a meeting or just talk with one another – we place a call on Skype. For free.

Whenever we need to organize assignments, share work we’ve completed, show everyone else what’s up on our end of a project – we post it all up on Google Wave. For free.

Whenever we’re in the middle of our work and receive a call from a friend or colleague on Skype – we have the option of just minimizing the program until we’re ready to call back. No obligation to receive visitors, no interruptions from secretaries, no more stupid questions from stupid people.

What we’ve managed is not only to work at home and cope, but to completely eliminate the office and thrive. By using Skype and Google Wave, we’ve saved ourselves thousands of dollars; developed an environment in which we can work on our own terms; and completely circumvented many of the obstacles to efficacy faced by traditional office-based businesses (i.e., restricted hours, higher costs for services like internet, forests of wasted paper, memos about memos, meetings about meetings about the meeting schedule, etc.).

It’s different, certainly – and it’s difficult, sometimes, to go against the grain. But, as young entrepreneurs, we have to realize that innovation is not just some abstract ideal that’s supposed to be necessary for success – if we treat it as no more than an idea, we’ll get nowhere.

But if we adopt it as our plan of action – then we see progress. The reason so few find success in their ventures is that everyone tries to take the same path to it. But if success is the end least often reached, it makes sense to take the path least often traveled. To innovate is to change something established; and what we’re doing here – throwing out the office and other costly factors in favor of Skype, Google Wave, and a home-based working environment – that, ladies and gentlemen, is innovation at its finest.