Falling in love with a "spectacular" business idea is possibly one of the mistakes entrepreneurs most often make. In fact it is one of the 30 Worst Mistakes of the Entrepreneur.
I have said many times that entrepreneurs are not successful.
I started saying it a couple of months ago, and I was the first one offended. I really don't really know if I was offended, resentful, or confronted. I mentioned that experience, in a recent article, it was at one of our live lectures.
And it is that coincidentally that propensity to "get excited" exaggerated by a business project that seems "spectacular", makes entrepreneurs fail to choose businesses with true growth potential.
Of course, when we are looking for a business opportunity, we need to be open-minded. We must be attentive, observe, look, listen, read, investigate and, above all, walk.
We already know, from experience, what happens when we fall in love.
Well it happens the same when we do it with that business idea that passes beautiful and glamorous in front of our eyes, perhaps raised by a friend, by a partner or by a close family member. Maybe we heard something that brought that idea to mind. Maybe someone at a party said something like, "You know what? the best business in the world is now… ”. Sure, we believed that guy and we kept thinking about it believing it was true.
Why don't I recommend that we fall in love with a business idea? It is true that being in love is nice, but nothing happens when we fall in love with our dream partner. Well, maybe not enough to die for. The worst would be a loving disappointment and dying of love. Even that is nice. Do you know how many good songs and poems have been written thanks to heartbreak?
But if you are not a singer or a writer, you should take care to easily fall in love with a business idea even if it seems beautiful and radiant.
Why not fall in love?
Because the stakes are high. When you start a new business you risk your time, your family's time, your enthusiasm, health and energy, and of course, you risk money, which is often someone else's money.
What to do then?
I am going to offer you five tips. In other articles we will delve into each one, some of our seminars and workshops deal intensively with these points that I am going to mention.
With what I will offer you today, to start:
1. You must be clear about your interests, motivations, values, principles, talents, abilities and aptitudes.
2. Find out if others have already invested in that business, determine if the market is growing, if there is demand and in what situation these businesses are at the moment.
3. Try to determine what is the trend of this type of business in twelve months, in five years and in ten years.
4. Look at the behavior of current customers and suppliers that are related to that product or business that you are considering. Are they growing? Are they stagnant? They are disappearing?
5. Try to measure the profit potential of that business. You must determine the sale price, expected volume, cost of production, contribution margin, fixed costs, initial investment and recovery time.
The above is just a start. With these five tips you can "filter" projects.
There is one more tip:
Try to have two or three business ideas that you can analyze at the same time, so that you can compare or weigh them. This way, you're less likely to fall blindly in love with one. For each idea, use the five tips.
Well and to add something else, I want to tell you that you must be clear about the knowledge and information that will need to be obtained when you decide on one or the other business.
Remember the interview with Luis Clachar; he took a year to decide on his business. You can see this interview on our channel www.emprendeyprospera.tv.
Leave your comments at the foot of this article and tell us. Have you ever fallen in love… with a spectacular business idea?
