If you are innovative, hardworking and entrepreneurial in nature, chances are you have had plenty of money making ideas that could have been the next big thing. So how do you take your ideas and do something potentially profitable with them?
In an interview with The Bottom Line, Naomi Simson discussed the businesses she shipped to market before hitting it big with Red Balloon. She also talked about the ideas she had that never took off. As a business owner and entrepreneur I can’t say my story is that different – you have a gut instinct for the ideas that are worth pushing across the line, but getting them there is a lot of work and requires strong vision to make it happen.
You also have just as many ideas that don’t quite make it. So, here are my three tips for identifying the good business ideas and delivering them to market.
- Continue to innovate and evolve. The idea you start with will most likely never be the exact product you launch to market. You have to be willing to keep an open mind and massage your original idea until the path to delivering it as a complete product becomes obvious. Some of the greatest innovations of our time have followed, and continue to follow this path – namely Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, all of which have evolved drastically from their early origins. As has been for these three big power players in the social space, the evolution will continue to take place even after you have launched your idea to market in order to stay current and fend off the threat of new competition.
- Understand the market value of your idea. Does the product or idea already exist? How can you be different? What skills do you have to help you execute your idea? Making sure you can answer these questions, along with basic business calculations surrounding direct competition, market size and learning potential can be crucial to refining your business opportunity and deciding whether or not it is worth investing in. Make sure you take the time to really ask yourself these hard questions and get a second opinion from a like-minded business professional that you trust so that you have a solid foundation to decide what your next steps should be.
- Don’t be afraid to take calculated risks. If tomorrow didn’t exist, what would you do today and how is that relevant to your passion and skills? I have spoken at a number of conferences recently about evolution media group’s path to success and it is surprising to me the number of people that have their own great ideas and passion for business, but have held back from putting themselves out there. Calculated risks in business are not only imperative at the start, but throughout the course of all that you do. Late American entrepreneur Jim Rohn famously said: If you are not willing to risk the unusual, you will have to settle for the ordinary.
What do you think, is the entrepreneurial idea or the ability to deliver it to market more important?
Join the conversation with me on Twitter @ceovanessa
Vanessa Stoykov is the founder of No More Practice, and the founder of the parent company, evolution media group in 1999. She has over 20 years’ experience in financial services as both a journalist and business owner. She is passionate about creating education and communications to help the wealth industry and consumers fulfill their prosperity potential.
