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.