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Today, I’m going to show you how to have great business ideas and how to put them to work for your business. This includes a step-by-step guide that you can easily follow.
Think about it: Behind every successful business are a series of ideas. Great business ideas, which open up new opportunities or set the business on a more fruitful path.
The challenge with great ideas is that they often look like average ideas, until after they become hugely successful. As a result, most great ideas never see the light of they.
In fact, I bet you have a few tucked away right now, without even knowing it.
Here’s an example of what I mean.
How a great business idea was mocked
In 1985, The New York Times announced the death of laptop computers, in an articled entitled; “Whatever happened to the laptop computer?” They wondered why laptops never became popular (seriously). Here’s how one of the greatest business ideas in history, was openly mocked:
“[…] I.B.M. never legitimized the market with its much rumored ”Clamshell,” probably because the company realized that laptops are a small niche market, not a mass market.”
Erik Sandberg-Diment. New York Times 1985.
And when the electric light bulb was invented, most people said it would never become a mass market product. It was thought that there was no affordable way to get electricity to enough homes.
How to have great business ideas that win!
Business owners sometimes ask me what I think of an idea they have. The challenge here, is that it doesn’t matter what I think or what their friends think. Great business ideas are not anointed. If you want to know how good your idea is, you need to get it out there.
If you do, you will find it’s almost impossible to fail.
Really?
Yes, really!
It’s a win win thing.
- If it is a great business idea and it flies, you’ll have a success on your hands.
- If it flops, you’ll learn something. Something that you can invest in the next idea and greatly increase your chances of success.
Ironically, the only way to guarantee a business idea will fail, is to try and protect it from failure by locking it away.
It’s a lose lose thing.
- The idea you fail to ship can’t succeed.
- The idea you fail to ship can’t teach you anything new.
This not only insulates you from success, it also insulates you from learning and growing. This used to be a major problem for me when I started out in business. I was in my late 20’s and lacking in confidence. I’d sometimes have a great business idea, but I wouldn’t put the idea into action.
I knew I needed to do it. I also knew it couldn’t work if I didn’t ship the idea. But for me, putting an idea into action, even one I thought was great, felt way too risky.
Thankfully, I discovered a way forward, which I’m now going to share with you, step-by-step.
Here’s the business idea strategy, which worked for me
I’ve shared this strategy with countless people over the years and the results have been amazing. It’s actually really simple.
My breakthrough came when I figured out that the part of my mind responsible for putting ideas into action, was weak. It needed strengthening. I thought one way to do this, would be to treat it like a weak muscle. To make a weak muscle strong, you start off by working with very light weights. As the muscle grows, you slowly increase the weight you’re working with. Eventually, the muscle becomes strong.
Here’s how it worked
I started by acting on what I considered to be small ideas. Ideas that were unlikely to set the world on fire if they worked, but where there was relatively little downside if they failed.
- I’d get a business idea.
- Every time I put one of these ideas into play, I’d write it down in a journal, along with the results.
- With each new business idea in my journal, my idea muscles grew a little.
- I also noticed that even with these small ideas, my business was starting to see some very encouraging results. This further built my idea muscles!
- Pretty soon I found it easy to get great business ideas, big, meaningful ones, and ship them.
- Every day since I’ve eagerly looked for ways to get great business ideas to help me make opportunities or solve problems.
- And if they’re interesting, I always put them into play.
As the frequency and size of the ideas you act on increases, so does your ability to get great ideas. This is reflected in the development of your business.
And something else happens. Business in general becomes a lot more interesting. That’s because working on new business ideas, even small ones, is extremely invigorating. It causes you to think differently, meet new people and explore new opportunities.
Just remember to start with small ideas. Slowly build it up. And be sure to chronicle your results, so you can see the progress you’re making and also learn from the feedback.
In short: How do you get great business ideas? You put the small business ideas you already have into play. Each time you do, your ability to have great ideas and ship them increases.