Little Ideas, Big Business

5 Steps to Turn Your Ideas into a Business

Billy McLean

• Publisher: Belinda McLean
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780645055450
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Entrepreneurship
• Index: Business

Have you got ideas buzzing around your head that you'd love to turn into business?

Do you know that you've got more to give than your everyday J.O.B.? T

hen this one's for you!

Everyone has valuable & unique ideas that are just waiting to be realised; so why doesn't everyone just do it??

What's holding people back when starting their own business? We'll look into that!

Not many know where to start or even how to sort their ideas into something that they can work with.

So often the overwhelm from so many thoughts makes people give up before they even start.

Here's 5 steps so that doesn't have to be you!

The 5 Steps

Turning Your Ideas into a Business

When I sit down and talk to people and they say they would love to build their own business, have their own craft shop, or teach people how to work with their hands, or about knowledge they have, it is always a pie in the sky. They always say, “Yeah, I would love to do this someday.” They have no actual plan.

I ask questions like:

“What are you doing now to get there?”

“What is your first step?”

“Who’s going to want your product (your target audience)?”

They look at me like I am asking them something in a foreign language. Many of them actually don’t believe it could be a reality.

When I asked the questions, it was like taking their dreams and smashing them together with a big dose of practicality. And in their minds, there was no connection between the business dream and reality.

I realised there was a logical progression to these questions. Once you have answered one, you have discovered the first step. Then you could move on to the next one, and put a plan in place to go from dreaming about running your business, to actually having the steps in place to get it up and running.

We are engineering all the time whether we know it or not. We are creating solutions for things. We are always trying to do something a little better; many of us just don’t realise it. The five steps is about optimising the process for taking your ideas and turning them into a reality.

If you take the journey one step at a time, it doesn’t matter whether you are an engineer, or what kind of person you are, everyone can turn their idea into a business.

If you are in a dark room, you can still do things, but it will take you a long time. You can still find things, feel your way around them, pick up things, probably achieve something, but it is not going to be fun, or quick. It takes more time and energy. This 5 step process is turning on that light and giving you the opportunity to see step by step the process of getting to and realising your business. These steps are your light bulb.

Step 1: The Brain Dump

When kids get excited, they have a million and one ideas, often can’t get their words out, and their hands go everywhere. Try and get a five year old to tell you the best thing that has just happened. Maybe it is their birthday and they just got THE BEST PRESENT EVER (you know that’s how they would say it!!)… Watch; they just can’t get all the words out, no sentence is finished and you probably know the colour, the size and how it sounds (and that IT’S AWESOME!!)… Their brain is moving at 100 miles an hour and their mouth just can’t keep up!

When we have business ideas it is exactly the same. We often have all of these thoughts that cascade all at once. If we don’t get them down on paper, they get lost. You remember the feeling when you had all of these ideas, but the actual details of them can be lost. It’s like you remember that you did have a dream and whether it was pleasant or not… but recalling the details is near impossible.

If you are in a dark room, you can still get things done. But it’s going to be a lot easier with the lights on!

When writing down our thoughts; we don’t want to cull them in any way. We don’t want to think “this one is bad” or “this one is better” just get them all out.

Neither does it have to be neat or tidy. Make it colourful! You can use coloured markers if you like rainbows, that’s all good. There may even be added creative bonuses from using different colours. Feel free to draw your ideas if that resonates better with you too.

When we have done the brain dump, remember they are not all necessarily going to come to fruition and they don’t all need to be addressed right now; and that is okay. It is okay to have an idea that is not for you, or...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• A Career & a Family
• The 3 Desires of the New Workforce
• Overcoming Roadblocks
• The 5 Steps
• Prototype to Production
• It’s Your Turn