Don’t Fail at Business; Pivot to Succeed
Not all entrepreneurs should launch their business ideas. Some should instead pivot to create a better business.
What if you could learn about tools that could help you decide if you could be profitable and successful in starting a business? Would you spend time going through that training before you started your business? Would you be willing to pivot to succeed?
Those tools and the training do exist. By utilizing those tools, so far several entrepreneurs have discovered before they made a significant investment of capital and time that there was no or little market for their product or service (the #1 reason businesses fail). Others have found that while there was a market, it wasn’t big enough to support an entirely new business. In one case, the entrepreneur instead took his product and partnered with another company with similar products and both parties succeeded that way.
Failure to start doesn’t mean failure in business. It can mean you found out before you launched that there might be something wrong—before you committed critical resources to the project. With these tools, you have the opportunity to “pivot” or re-evaluate your idea. Maybe you need to change directions. Or maybe you have a good idea but it just isn’t viable at this point. That’s what these business tools (canvases) are all about.
Finding the right market to sell to
An acquaintance of mine had a product that he felt homeowners would love. It erased crayon from almost all surfaces without destroying or marring the furniture or walls. His prospects did love it, but he discovered they weren’t willing to pay fair market price for it. Fortunately, he found churches, schools and other places that served children that loved this product and would pay for it. He has now sold about half a million of them. This would never have happened if he had launched with a direct-to-homeowners approach.
These business tools / canvases can help you be better prepared in launching your business and help you find the right customers before you waste money and time trying to build a business. Some of these tools can also help you launch a better-structured business.
Don’t give up – Pivot from your own business
Another client had a sleeping bag with a unique design. As he began the process of deciding to launch a business or not, he discovered it would take a lot of money to break into the market and the payoff would be more than 10 years out. So instead, he looked at pivoting by working with a company that was already making sleeping bags, and he licensed the design to them and is now making a comfortable living from the royalties.
There are times when starting a business is just not going to work and neither is pivoting to working with someone else or even selling it off. Isn’t it better to fail in the planning stage rather than end up $100,000 (or more) in debt with nothing going the way you had hoped?
Simon Sinek once said “What good is an idea if it remains an idea? Try. Experiment. Iterate. Fail. Try again. Change the World.” I believe you should fail with little or no money invested and succeed once you have found the “Golden Ticket” in business preparation.
If you decide to take on building a strong business by working with these tools, it will take time and it will require you to do some homework. You’ll have strategies to plan and you will need to get out and talk to people about your ideas, your prototypes, what they really want and what they are expecting. You will also need to take a hard look at what you want to do and honestly evaluate its viability and timing.
But you will know BEFORE you’ve invested your time, money, blood, sweat and tears whether your business is going to work and how to give it the best start possible.
Want more information?
http://bpmedia.com/bizstartuppp