"In 1945, newly married and with barely 5,000 US dollars in the bank, Anna and Leonard Shoen initiated a sequence of events that led to the creation of U-Haul. Within four years, the duo had founded a company that made it possible to rent a trailer one-way from city to city throughout most of the United States.
Examining these events, we find that this could not have been accomplished by using prediction or by trying to measure risk. In fact, if you tried to write a business plan for this venture, you would conclude that the plan is financially infeasible, since it requires a large and risky capital outlay for a network of relatively low-value assets such as trucks and rental locations spread across the country.
Moreover, the logistics of starting the business on a much smaller scale and growing it as fast as U-Haul did, overwhelms the analytical prowess of the best of forecasters. The lack of any entry barriers to imitators with deep pockets is seen as another insurmountable obstacle to success."