Tuesday’s= Starting a Business
When I hear a new business owner excitedly tell me “No one has ever done this before,” my first thought is “uh oh.” The reason for that is because in my over 30 years of business experience I have seen that there is often a reason why no one has ever done it before. Sometimes the reason is because the business owner’s idea is a bad idea. Now of course this is not always the case, sometimes the idea is one whose time has finally come.
How does one determine whether the idea is going to work? Well, the short answer is that you cannot usually figure that out ahead of time. No one predicts the future with any amount of accuracy.
Some ideas are easier to discount than others. For example – the soon to be business owner who thinks the beach needs an ice cream store in January had better be in a hot climate!
New business owners face a challenge in figuring out if the business idea will attract enough customers to be a success. Enthusiasm and persistence are both good traits for a start-up’s owner to possess, but there has to be a chance for success for those traits to create a viable business. The customary advice is to start small, see if the business gets some traction and expand from there.
We have the same concern about an existing business offering a new product or service. How do we know there is a big enough market? However, the existing business likely has more resources than the start-up and they can afford to have a product or two not work out.
When you are considering starting a business or adding a product or service -just take a minute to consider why no one has ever done this before.
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