Written by ShawnTe Pierce

While your company might be living up to its small business designation right now, if you follow the examples of the entrepreneurs below, there's a good chance that you will grow your business.

Richard Branson: Virgin Group

Virgin mogul Richard Branson dropped out of school at 15, and a year later started a student magazine called Student. Suffering from dyslexia did not stop Branson from becoming one of the most courageous risk takers in the business world. In the 1970s, Branson, along with business partner Nik Powell, began a discount records mail order venture that became music giant Virgin Records. Even though Virgin Records was sold to EMI for $1 billion in 1992, the Virgin brand is still alive, according to Fresh Thinking Business, with Branson constantly seeking new ventures to explore and make millions at.

The thing that sets Branson apart from many entrepreneurs is his fearlessness and sense of adventure. Branson has a natural affinity for marketing and has been known to pull out all the stops. With the Virgin brand on many products and services -- including Branson's own private island in the British Isles called Necker Island, which he rents out -- the money continues to roll in. A lesson to be had from the life and adventures of this extraordinary man is to seize opportunity when it presents itself with fearlessness and determination.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin: Google

A dissertation project of Larry Page (with the help of Sergey Brin) led to the development of a search engine that actually pulled up relevant leads for Internet searches: Google. Ever since PC Magazine reported that Google "has the uncanny knack for returning extremely relevant results" in its top 100 Web sites for 1998, the search engine giant has shown no sign of slowing down.

Page and Brin started small with their search engine first being used solely at Stanford University. Eventually, they lent the service to Yahoo with much success before branching off to become the Google Web portal the world knows today. While search engines were nothing new when Google arrived on the scene, Page and Brin found a way to improve upon it. By crawling back links and establishing a page ranking system, Google's search engine arguably returns the quickest and most relevant links of all of the major search engines.

This is what set Page and Brin's product apart from the rest -- finding a better solution to an existing product or service and continually improving upon it. This is what moved Google from a small business operating out of a garage into the technological giant ranked 150 in Fortune magazine's top 500 corporations of 2008.

Jeffrey Bezos: Amazon.com

Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos is an entrepreneur who saw an opportunity and pursued it, never looking back. With a degree and work experience in computer science and engineering, Bezos became enamored with the Web in 1994. Seeing this avenue of communication for the untapped resource it was, Bezos searched to find an industry that would benefit the most from online exposure. Bezos' search led him to book sales. Now the world's largest marketplace for books and more, Amazon.com is a Fortune 500 company currently ranked at 171, with Bezos himself on Forbes' list since 1999, and ranked 33rd in 2008.

Bezos' success stems from careful research and planning. He recognized a delivery system that was virtually untapped and sought out an industry that could profit the most from it. Amazon.com's continued success stems from Bezos continually seeking new ways to improve his company's reach.

Sam Walton: Wal-Mart

Sam Walton is the founder of the No. 1 retailer in the country and the No. 1 corporation in Fortune's top 500 list for 2008: Wal-Mart. Walton grew up during the Great Depression in Missouri, which had a heavy influence on his work ethic. He knew that to succeed, one had to put in hard work, and that's what he did. The start of his retail career came when he opened several franchises of the Ben Franklin five-and-dime store in Arkansas. In 1962, Roger, Ark., saw the first Wal-Mart Discount City debut in America. Things blossomed from there.

Starting Wal-Mart Corp. subsidiaries, such as Sam's Club, took hard work and a strong work ethic from Walton. He knew the way to succeed in retail was to offer name-brand merchandise at low prices, which has been the core of the Wal-Mart philosophy, even after Walton's passing in 1992. It seems appropriate to end with the legacy Sam Walton left the world.