I often wonder what is that magic moment when an entrepreneur decides this is the idea that I am going to start and by implication how many entrepreneurs don’t start their idea. Often one gets so wrapped up in trying to find that needle in the haystack (note the lack of many here). What if you were to adjust that assumption to look for many needles in the haystack.How different would things turn out? Yes, it might be a bit confusing initially with thoughts like which idea do you pick, how much work should you do on it before deciding to move to something else? But …
imagine how different you would act if you knew that there were many needles [aka ideas] out there and instead of trying to find the one, rather pick one of the many.
Lets jump ahead to where you now have a multitude of ideas and you are starting to feel like a dog chasing its tail. What is the next step?
In my humble opinion, the next step is to spend sometime establishing a simple checklist for yourself of what is important to you, how you want to spend your day, what you like and so forth. For example, do you like travelling, working shifts that could include weekends, levels of customer interaction.
Now once you have that list, you compare that to your ideas. Lets say for example you don’t like working weekends and don’t really want to most of your working time to be directly interacting with customers – then if you had a customer service business like a restaurant on your list, you would scratch it off unless you are sure you are able to from the start employ someone else to do this.
Once your have aligned your business ideas with what you value and like, the next step is to start to build a very short term working plan. What I mean here is, what is the next steps you need to do. Before you do this, however, ask yourself the question – how much resources (time, money and other people) do I have available to put to the next short term milestone. Once you know this, you can start to establish what the next milestone will be and then what you need to do to get there. You can then of course check this back with your resource budget to see if its achievable.
A head of caution, this might sound like a lot of work and perhaps slightly neurotic 😉 … but this doesn’t have to take you long, its more that you (a) understand what your commitment is and (b) you match your commitment to what you want to achieve.
You can really then loop this simple process till you are at a point where you have one idea and you are ready to decide if you are going to start or not.