Business Solutions

Are you Ready to Start a Business?

Regardless of what brings people to entrepreneurship, there are questions that each must ask themselves before deciding to dive in. And, you’re no different if you aspire to start a business of your own! You should begin with the understanding that starting and growing a practical business with staying power takes more than just a good idea. You should clearly know if you have what it takes? I’m going to discuss some things to help you determine if you’re actually ready to start a business!

One of the very first things to carefully consider when you’re contemplating your business is to define with a high-level of detail, the problem that your business is going to solve. The problem really needs to be something genuine that people regularly experience and as a result strongly desire an effective solution for it. For instance, if your business idea is to open a coffee shop, you need to be sure that you provide your customers a strong enough motive to buy coffee from your shop. Possibly the motive is because of your location and you make it convenient (convenience is the solution) for people to easily buy from you. Or, you make the best coffee (a separate solution) for miles around. Or maybe you and your staff know every customer’s specific drink and that superior customer service makes people feel special (another distinct solution).

At this point I must ask, “Why do people think it’s so hard to come up with ideas for startups?”

That might seem a silly thing to ask. But, why do they think it’s difficult? If people can’t do it, then it is difficult, at least for the ones that can’t, right?

Well, maybe not. How people usually answer is not that they “can’t think of ideas,” but the fact is they really “don’t have any ideas.” In essence, that’s not entirely the same thing. It could be the most likely reason they don’t have any ideas is simply the fact that they haven’t really tried generating them.

I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, and believe that this is the case most of the time. I think the majority of people consider coming up with ideas for startup businesses is very hard…  that it must be very hard… and so they don’t even bother trying to do it. They make the wrong assumption that ideas are like miracles, and they either come to you like a vision, or they don’t.

After thousands of conversations about the subject of ideas, I’ve concluded that people tend to always overvalue ideas. They think with the misconception that creating a startup is just a matter of implementing some amazingly fabulous initial idea. And since a successful startup turns out to be worth millions of dollars, the good idea for it therefore has to be worth a million dollars.

They truly believe as fact, that coming up with an idea for a startup has to be equal to coming up with a million dollar idea, then their perceived reality of course, is it’s going to seem very difficult. Way too difficult, so why bother trying? Our instincts simply tell us it’s impossible for something so valuable to just be lying around for someone to come along and discover it.

In reality, the vast majority of startup ideas are not a million dollar brainchild. But, what evolves out of the idea can be something else altogether. Recognizing that nothing evolves faster than the speed of markets, it is just possible that the evolution of simple ideas is where the real value lies, and the hard fact that there’s no market for startup ideas suggests there’s no demand, which in turn means, in the narrowest sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless… until they evolve into that something else.