As Scott Belsky put, “It’s not about ideas. It’s about making ideas happen.” It’s really not that the success of an idea depends on its uniqueness and potential foremost.
Rather, it depends on how you bring the idea into action.
You may have heard of, as an entrepreneurship enthusiast, people calling an idea to be a “billion dollar idea”.
However, ideas in themselves are of negligible worth, if not none at all. It’s hard to sell just an idea at even few thousands of dollars, unless you’re an expert salesperson.
But don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to undermine the value of an idea at all. In fact, a concrete idea is the first and foremost thing that you need. Then after that, below are the 10 steps you need to follow to grow your innovative idea into a profitable enterprise.
1. Identify strengths and weakness of your idea.
A common fallacy among young, enthusiastic entrepreneurs is the invulnerability regarding their idea. It is very convenient to believe that your idea is impeccable. This however is not always the case. No matter how brilliant an idea is, it will have shortcomings.
A proper analysis of strength and weakness of your idea will help you understand its actual value. It can help you identify risks and difficulties in implementing your ideas. Furthermore, it can reveal opportunities that you are unaware of.
Once you identify the strengths and weaknesses in your plan, you can decide on time and money to put into the endeavor.
2. Create a business model.
Your idea is not going to earn money by itself. You need to find the best ways to milk money from your idea. You will need a proper business model for that.
A proper business model will help you figure out elements such as- who are your customers, which demography does your idea appeal to, what marketing approach should you take, whether you need to
have your own blog or not, what are the company's capital and resource requirements and how does the company plan to manage its operations as it grows.
A business model helps you to set clear financial goals and develop a proper implementation strategy to achieve those goals.
3. Find a structured approach to formulate the plan.
After creating a concrete business model to execute your idea, you need to take a structured approach towards implementation of the plan.
Structured approach is one of the fundamental project management techniques. Trying to execute a plan without a proper strategy is like embarking on a journey without map.
Structured approach advocates incremental growth of a business plan. With this approach, you formulate the plan to tackle the different issues of the enterprise, one step at a time.
4. Take feedback from experts.
One of the biggest mistakes often young entrepreneurs make is that they don’t care to take any suggestion from experts. They feel their idea is solid and see no need for any feedback.
However, with years of experience down their belt, experts can understand the multiple aspects of your enterprise in a much more dynamic and realistic manner.
Taking feedback from experts will help you to take a better approach towards implementation of your project and will also introduce you to facades you might not have considered previously.
5. Form an alliance.
If you think you alone can successfully grow a huge enterprise, you are wrong. If it’s a small scale enterprise, you could do it on your own. But even in that case, teamwork helps a lot.
You need to find a group of likeminded individuals with compatible skills and who add to the value of the group. It’s best to go for people with different skill sets.
It’s always better to form a group of a developer, manager, designer,
marketer and business analyst than of all five developers.
6. Find an investor who values your idea.
In most of the cases, you need to make significant investments at the beginning before there’s any chance of your idea bearing fruits.
It’d be great if you could finance your business all by yourself. But even if that’s not possible, there are ways to make investments. You could take loans from banks but they are hard to get.
Having an investor to invest in your enterprise would be a welcome idea. However, it’s not easy to convince someone to splash out large sums of cash into a nubile enterprise. Finding an investor who values your idea is one important step for the growth of your business.
7. Earn your team’s support.
Just increasing the number of heads in your team doesn’t achieve anything for the success of your enterprise. You need to build a solid team.
You need to build a cohesive team where individuals add up to each other. For that, the most important thing is to build a sense of trust and belief within the team.
You need to earn the support of your team. You need to instill belief in them that your enterprise is going to succeed. You might even need to make compromises in doing so.
8. Focus to boost skills within your team.
For the continuous growth of your business, the team members also need to grow constantly. That requires continuous
increment of individual skills.
Even when the business is not really succeeding, you need to find ways to aid in the boost of individual skills of team members. The members should constantly upgrade themselves for the betterment of business as well.
It might be hard to do so in the beginning. But you should set aside some amount for trainings of the members, their recreation and also challenge them at every step.
9. Expand your idea.
Ideas often arise from that sudden spark, when you feel you have come up with something big. At that point, you could even explain your idea in a sentence.
But ideas continuously grow. You might start with something elementary but after lots of brainstorming and planning, you add lots of aspects to your idea.
With the growth of your business, you should continuously work on reforming your idea. You should regularly refine it, adjust it to requirements and try to make it relevant.
10. Know your competitors.
You might think that your idea is one-off and never thought of before. But there are high chances somebody else has already thought of it in one way or another.
Whether the idea is novel one or quite common, you will always have lots of competitors, both new and those with years of presence in the industry.
You should give plenty of thoughts towards contending with the competitors, existing and potential ones alike. The success of a business always depends on outsmarting of the rivals.