The world needs more business do-ers than business dreamers
If I had a dollar for everyone who tells me they have an amazing small business idea…
I’m a small business fanatic. I love small business. Its small business first for me. I love hanging out with small business people and nearly all of my closest friends are small business owners. The myth is that small business owners are dreamers with amazing small business ideas. But I don’t agree. The reason I love small business owners is that they’re do-ers. Small business owners don’t dream (besides the normal dreams we all have), they don’t have amazing small business ideas, they roll up their sleeves, they take control of life, and they deal with whatever comes their way, and those are the kind of people I like hanging out with.
I often go to networking events and seminars and conferences and I sometimes get cornered by people who want to tell me about their amazing business idea. Obviously, as a business coach, I’m in the perfect position to give them some kind of off-the-cuff wisdom which is going to turn their amazing idea into a multibillion dollar startup.
2 billion pet owners
“Oh wonderful… You’re a business coach, that must be so exciting … You know, I’ve got this great idea for a start-up. I want to develop this app. It’s going to keep pets that are left alone at home during the day company so they don’t start scratching the furniture or annoy the neighbours with their yelping all day long.” They breathe excitedly. “I know there is an incredible market for it, believe me, and we can build it in the cloud and we’ll create a kind of social media app with it that lets everyone keep track of their dogs and cats at home and it’s going to be so cool” (It’s always going to be ‘So Cool’ you know.) “All I need is some Angel funding for a marketing campaign and to get the app built in India, and the website and that kind of stuff… Did you know there are 2 billion pet owners around the world and if even 0.1% of those people subscribed to the app for $25 per month… I’m really good at developing these amazingly creative ideas, but the implementation side of things is not my strength area, know what I mean?… Can you help me?”
Uhhhhhh… No… Please go away
Whenever I get cornered by someone like that I feel tempted to tell them that my most successful client, The guy that inspires me more than anyone in business I’ve ever met, is my client who has taken his business from half a million dollars turnover in 2007 to $75 million today… and he sells milk.
We need more implementers
The world really does not need more amazing small business ideas. What the world needs more of are disciplined, focused implementers.
Of course, we’ve all read about Elon Musk and Jeff Bazos and Mark Zuckerberg and they did have a new idea and now they’re worth uncountable billions. But Mark Zuckerberg didn’t just have an idea and get others to build it and deliver it and implement it. Zuckerberg spent years grinding away doing his own coding… From what I know, a lot of the base coding in Facebook was written by Zuckerberg himself and even now I believe he still gets under the hood of Facebook regularly. The same goes for most super entrepreneurs. For many years after Microsoft had already become an institution in the PC world, Bill Gates had his fingers in all of the most important code that Microsoft created, and he got involved in the delivery and the management and all the other key areas of his company.
The secret to building a great business is in actually building it. Ideas are cheap… what are you going to build today?