How to come up with and evaluate a business Idea

       

On this post today, we will be learning how to build a business from within us to our world using some models and suggestions given subsequently. Hope this articles help you launch a company. This is my goal for you. One of the biggest struggles that people face, as aspiring entrepreneurs, is the struggle to generate ideas for new businesses that spark excitement, hold promise, and drive action. When aspiring entrepreneurs drown in a sea of empty ideas one of two things usually happens.

1.      The lack of compelling ideas can become such an incredible source of frustration that it dissuades aspiring entrepreneurs from pursuing entrepreneurship as a career.

2.      The aspiring entrepreneurs start businesses similar to the ones they see around them, yet another restaurant or retail shop that faces endless competition, often leading to a quick demise.

Either way the aspiring entrepreneur loses – loses interest, loses motivation, or loses money. An aspiring entrepreneur who does not have a compelling business idea to pursue is merely a dreamer.

Unfortunately, the huge majority of books and courses on entrepreneurship almost completely ignore this all important idea-generating step. They usually start off with the assumption that you already have a great idea and then they walk you through the feasibility plan or business plan creation process.

In fact, this article was created out of frustration about a lack of existing information available about how to generate new business ideas. The few books and magazine articles available with any information on the topic usually had one primary piece of advice, “look for customer needs.” But how does an aspiring entrepreneur really do this? To find customer needs, what is the first step, second step, and third step?

What are the key considerations you should think about? Where should you begin? Too many questions remained unanswered.

The answers to these and other questions are clearly addressed in the pages that follow.

The first part of this article will walk you through an easy-to-follow, step-by-step process to help you quickly generate lots of new business ideas. The second part will show you a simple yet powerful way to evaluate your ideas so you can quickly identify which of your ideas hold the most promise. The more good business ideas you have the better the likelihood you can identify that compelling new idea that matches your goals, aspirations and dream and compels you to take action. That journey begins here.

Strategy #1:

Doing What You Love

Starting a successful new business takes time. Lots of time. So as you begin to think about compelling new business ideas none are more important to consider than those related to your areas of passion and vocation.

If you’re going to invest the long hours it takes to plan and successfully run a new business it is absolutely critical that you are passionate and get excited about the business concept you ultimately embrace. Your passion naturally translates into every aspect of your business.

If you lack passion for the new business, your planning effort will almost certainly be stunted.

Dispassion about your business will ooze out in nearly every area of your business – making it even harder for you to generate investment funding, hire good employees, and earn revenue. In a competitive marketplace, dispassion can nearly condemn a new business to failure even before it starts.

Passionate entrepreneurs have an edge.

Examples:

When you’re passionate you’ll be much more willing to invest the time it takes to create the right strategy and execute it successfully. Why not create a business that motivates you to wake up early, stay up late, and provides a sense of fulfillment? How do you identify your areas of passion and how do you turn that into a business of doing what you love? The following example will walk you through, step by step, in a simple and easy format that will help you generate new business ideas that hone in on your top areas of passion.

Generate Ideas:

Doing What You Love

1.      Write your answers to the following questions to identify some of your top areas of passion (Also refer to lesson 1 on the Dream Lab:

·         How do you like to spend your weekends?

·         If a long-lost rich uncle wrote you a check for 5,000,000 FCFA how would you then spend your time? (after any initial travel & shopping sprees are done)

·         What kind of magazines do you like to read?

·         What kind of websites do you like to visit?

·         What are the things that you like to do?

·         What are things that you are good at?

·         What are your interests and deep desires?

·         What would you do if you knew it was absolutely impossible to fail?

 

2.    Each of these answers indicates some of your top areas of interest and passion. Circle your top two areas of passion from this list above.

3.    Copy each of these top two areas of passion onto the top of the following pages.

4.      Write down all of the steps associated with each activity in the STEPS column on the next page (see example below as a guide).

5.      Then, as you look at each step ask yourself ‘what do you find annoying or frustrating about this step?’ This will help you identify pain points associated with each step. Write down these pain points in the PAIN POINTS column on the next page (see example below as a guide).