How often is it that your ‘no-brainer’ business or project, goes from being a ‘no-brainer’ to something that requires serious problemsolving and stops looking like being so easy and so much fun?
I’ve never been part of anything that doesn’t have a honeymoon period that ends and as it ends all in a rude kind of rush it turns into what looks like a pile of drudge. And it’s at that point that you have to make a decision as to whether you’re going to stay with it and work through the issues that arise, or whether your time could best be used elsewhere.
Those who roll their sleeves up and stay usually have to do a number of things to get the honeymoon passion back into what they’re doing – in essence you have to fall in love with the business all over again, but this time with some really clear ideas and market intelligence on how it works or doesn’t and a plan of attack that can actually take it somewhere.
You can write all the business and marketing plans in the world, and I suggest that you do have some kind of plan to follow, however nothing beats a plan like reality. In fact reality plus a plan is what I call a super plan. Once you get your business underway you find out things that just weren’t obvious at the outset and the plan you had starts to take a different form.
Feeling like the honeymoon is over and you're stuck with the sow's ear - look for the value in your business and create that silk purse.
This doesn’t mean your research is off, it means that all the research in the world cannot predict what the hard cold light of reality is really going to look like. Your research is at best a guesstimate at a certain point in time of what may happen. It’s the actual point at which your business is up and going and has a customer or two that you can start to get a clearer picture on what it really is and where it could go.
Suddenly a small market segment that you thought would become a part of your later marketing campaigns becomes the only segment you have and one that you need to get to know a whole lot better. At this time it is just so easy to fall for the two birds in the bush theory, however you are so much the wiser if you actually concentrate on the bird you have in hand and work to make your product or service totally valued by that bird in the hand.
Another way of looking at this is, where is the real value in here? Did we maybe have some idea of where the value would be when we got started, but that was an intellectual idea and now we have a business that is going and growing with all the issues that come along for the ride with business and we’re starting to look at it quite differently? It may be that your original guiding vision is still the one that gets you out of bed in the morning and gets you excited, revisit that vision with all the new knowhow that’s at your fingertips.
If you think you have a sow’s ear it may actually just be that the startup honeymoon phase, which for some could last for years, is over and it’s now time to find the exquisite business beauty in what you do and to create something really special. It may be much smaller than you’d envisaged, then again it’s potential could actually end up being much greater than that original intellectual business plan, but don’t do one thing that it’s so easy to do, and decide that because there are just so many obstacles and so many things not in your plan have popped up, that this is not a good business or you’re not good at it. Business is complex and those who are really good at it, in my opinion, can deal with high levels of ambiguity, can be at ease when lots of things are not going right and only a few are. They also know that the other guy whose really cool business that he talks about so swimmingly, is probably experiencing just as many hassles and dramas and roads taken and then turned back from, as they are.
So if you’re wondering how your wonderful business idea that you changed your whole life around to get underway has turned into something so difficult, decide to think again, in there somewhere is the silk purse, the real value of your business that is just waiting for you to find it and run with it anew.
Photo: japan_style
David and I write about some of our sow’s ear moments and how we got back to a silk purse perspective about business in our book about the Arts Hub adventure – Niche Content Millionaire.
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Niche Content Millionaire is a downloadable eBook that tells you the true story how we made millions from subscription content and membership websites. |
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