Finding a new business idea for success
How do you find a new product or service, recognising that 80 percent or more will be new in five years? Here's a series of ideas.
Number one, begin with yourself. Begin with your own talents, your abilities, your experience, knowledge, interest, background, education, and so on. Look carefully at your current work, your current business, your current position, or your current product or service. Seek for what is called your own acres of diamonds. Look under your own feet.
What qualities account for your greatest successes in life so far? What personal qualities and abilities have gotten you to where you are? And how could you apply those qualities and abilities to starting and building a new business?
If you already have a company, ask what are your companies' talents, abilities, experience, knowledge, interest, background, and so on. What qualities and talents and abilities have enabled your company to succeed up to now? Where can you specialise? Where can you make a difference?
Number two is look for a product or service about which you can really become enthusiastic. Sometimes people become wealthy by translating or transforming their hobbies into a business. You will be most successful doing something or marketing something that you really love.
Every product must have a champion. Every product or service must have someone in the business that really, really loves the product or service and is eager to get out and tell other people about it.
The basic truth is that most people who start or manage a business simply don't have the skills needed to make their business profitable. It's not their fault. They just haven't learned HOW to build a profitable business.I know from years of first-hand experience that you can easily learn the basics to give you the essential tools for creating a business that can flourish in any market.
Number three; look for something that is an improvement on an existing product or service, not something brand new. Look for something that's cheaper or better quality. Or that has additional features or functions. Look for something that's an improvement.
Remember improving an existing successful product or service is the fastest and surest way to build a successful business. An idea only needs to be ten percent new and better to capture substantial market share. Brand new products or services are very risky.
The fourth key to finding a new product or service is this. Don't look for easy money. Don't look for gimmicks or useless knickknacks. Don't look for get-rich-quick schemes or rewards without working, because there aren't any.
More people have wasted more time and more life and more money trying to find quick ways to make easy money than you can possibly imagine. So be willing to put in a lot of hard work before you start making real money in a business.
Success takes time, and it generally takes two years to break even in the average business. It takes four years to show a profit. It takes maybe eight to ten years before it starts to generate real cash flow. So you have to be patient. If you're impatient, what will happen is you'll end up setting yourself further back than you can imagine.
Here are a couple of action exercises. First, be prepared to research a lot of business ideas before you make a final decision. The first 10% of time that you spend doing your homework will save you 90% of the effort in getting results later on. Second, look for something that you can make an improvement upon rather than something brand new.
You are surrounded by ideas and opportunities for improvement if you can just identify them.
