“There are fast ideas and slow ideas, just as there are fast trains and slow trains. When it comes to money, most people are on the slow train looking out the window watching the fast train pass them by. If you want to become rich quickly, your plan must include fast ideas.” – Robert Kiyosaki
The world is filled with promising entrepreneurs carrying business plans and in quest of investment capital. The sad news is that nearly 80 % of these entrepreneurs are never going to go beyond the initial planning stage and that’s the hard truth.
Are you a business opportunity waiting to happen? A little self-examination might help you decide.
Start with a serious assessment of your knowledge and skills. What are your strengths? What do you do really well? Can you turn this into a home-based business? Do you know anyone else who has? How are they doing at it? Could you improve upon what they do? Write all of this down.
It all begins with an idea and a desire to start a business based on this idea. It could be a new Product, it could be a new Service, it could be a new way to produce something, or it could be something as simple as starting a new restaurant. The key is that there is an entrepreneur that wants to do something different and has the motivation to pursue it.
Generally in this phase, things look better than they later turn out to be. It appears that riches are assured, the size of the opportunity is overestimated, the time and effort required to get there are underestimated, and potentially fatal flaws are not visible. To help avoid over-optimism during this phase, Talk with one or two trusted friends who had their own business before. Describe your idea and listen carefully to their opinions and recommendations regarding what you should do before you jump in.
Also Make an assessment of this opportunity and your own abilities.
In particular, (a) try to get an idea of what the potential market size would be and (b) try to find competitors that are currently serving this market that you can learn from.
Concentrate on what you most enjoy doing in life. If you could do just one thing for a living and make all the money you'd ever need doing it, what would that be? CAN you make a living doing it? Are there others doing it? If you can't make a living doing it, is there something you can do that is related to it? For example, if your favorite activity in life is golf but you know that you could never make the pro tour, what business could you start that would allow you to make a comfortable living while you spend your days thinking about and doing something involving golf? Again, make sure that you put pen to paper as you do this important exercise.
Is this all you need to know? No. These questions form only a starting point from which you can and must proceed into more intense research. But these questions can certainly serve to get your creative juices flowing and help you decide what type of home-based business is right for you. Besides, it's a lot of fun to just sit down and dream of the many possibilities of a life spent doing what you enjoy most.
Launching a business out of the planning board requires a mettle; quitting your job to start your own business require guts, believing in your business idea even when everyone says you are nuts requires guts and facing business challenges also require guts. Guts, chutzpa, boldness, brevity,courage; they all mean the same thing. Without entrepreneurial guts, just forget about starting a business.
The next thing you need to make your business idea a reality is skills. What are you bringing to the table? This is the question you must answer when seeking joint ventures and business partnerships. Your possessed entrepreneurial skills are very important to the realization of your ideas because your skills can be a strength or competitive advantage for your business. Skills are a necessity when searching for a business team.
You probably must have heard this over and over again but I think it’s worth repeating. You can’t build a business if you lack the right mindset. Entrepreneurship is not really about starting or building a business. Entrepreneurship is simply a change in perception or core value. It’s the process of developing your mindset from being job dependent to being financially independent. It’s a shift from being handicapped in the face of challenges to being a problem solver. In all, entrepreneurship is simply a change of mindset.
I believe you know that no business idea is worth a pinch of salt without capital. I don’t want to stress much on this because I believe you know the significance of capital to any business. But in retrospect, I always advice my proteges not to be deterred by lack of capital. I encourage them to get creative when it comes to financing their small business startups; where there is a will, there will surely be a way.
Finally, you need the right business management team in place to build a business around your idea. For your business idea to leave the planning phase, it’s going to require the right business team. If you can assemble the right team to deliver on your plans, I bet you will find the venture capital because a strong business team is an essential ingredient to the process of raising capital from Venture capitalists.