Many young entrepreneurs (and older ones) are under the impression that generating a good idea is the most important part of building a successful business. However, a great number of businesses fall flat on their face because of an inability to recognize the amount of work that is required to make them successful.
In the grand scheme of business building, very little of the hard work involves coming up with the idea. Most of the effort comes from working on all of the key processes that go into making a business successful. Project management, marketing, product development, and customer relations, the ability to replicate your business, are just some of the areas that are essential to the functioning of a profitable business.
Obviously ideas are the initial seed that all successful businesses grow from, but they are not the only important ingredient involved in the business building process.
In the world famous book “E-myth revisited,” Geber draws on the important distinction between creativity and innovation with the following quote,
“Creativity thinks up new things. Innovation does new things.” Professor Levitt
Coming up with ideas is important, but you can start a business using someone else’s ideas or products. Ideas aren’t going to take you very far without the knowledge and the expertise of how to implement them. Innovating is where most of the hard work begins.
Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that a good idea naturally equates to the foundations of a sound business or you’ll find that you’ve fallen into that first pit.
