Posted in Blog, Entrepreneurship, Grow, Innovation, Innovation, Intrapreneurship, Lead by Jo North
It’s time to make your business ideas happen!
Do you have great plans for your business, but never seem to have the time to make your business ideas happen?
Have you got so many plates spinning that innovation, potential opportunities and initiatives that would grow your business fall by the wayside instead?
In this article I share:
- What you need to achieve challenging goals
- How to plan your time to ensure that you make your business ideas happen
- How good initiative management can free up your time, along with my initiative checklist for you to do a quick self-assessment
- Top tips for achieving your innovation goals alongside your busy and demanding daily business operations
What you need to achieve challenging goals
There has been a lot of research into success throughout recent decades, but I’d like to focus on some more recent research by Angela Duckworth. Angela Duckworth has explored why some people are more successful than others in achieving challenging goals. She found that success is not completely due to talent, but has more to do with grit.
“Grit is passion and sustained persistence applied toward long-term achievement, with no particular concern for rewards or recognition along the way. It combines resilience, ambition, and self-control in the pursuit of goals…”
Angela Duckworth
The good news is that grit is something you can develop. It’s like a mental muscle that you can grow with consistent practise.
What gets in the way of making business ideas happen?
Based on my decades of work with businesses of all shapes and sizes all over the world, there is a common cluster of reasons why many potentially great ideas never see the light of day.
- Boredom is one factor. People like the idea of something, but they don’t always like the reality of doing the work or making the changes necessary to make it happen.
- Effort is another. Sometimes you have a great idea and you think you want to do something, but the effort to get from zero to a meaningful outcome can feel big and overwhelming.
- Starting small can feel insignificant.
- Sometimes you don’t feel that you’ve got the time to put in.
- Know-how can also be a barrier. You’ve got a great idea, but you just don’t know how to go about doing it.
- Often the problem lies in low self-belief. You worry about your idea failing, and fear of failure can really get in the way. My articles here on how to Dare to be Different and How to Be a More Self-Confident Business Leader will help if this challenge resonates with you.
Even if you need to get creative or ask for help, there are ways around every single one of these barriers.
It’s important that you identify the root cause of what’s really holding you back, which might be different from what you say or think is getting in the way. Only then can you work out what to do about it and what strategies you need to put in place to make your business ideas happen.
Are you creating time to make your business ideas happen?
It’s so easy for us to be dazzled by the volume of opportunities and ideas out there. And it can all look very attractive and exciting! However, if you want to make your business ideas happen, you need to make sure that you are looking at the cumulative effect of what you’re taking on. It’s important to make sure that you have clear priorities and that you are spending time reviewing what’s working and what’s not.
“The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”
Michael Porter
It’s important to focus on the things that matter whilst not allowing yourself to get distracted by too many other things, as that really gets in the way of making progress.
We each have exactly the same budget of 168 hours each week. You have much more control over how you invest those hours than you might think we have.
Do the contents of your diary reflect what you want to achieve in the future, as well as what you need to do today?
Ditch or delegate low value adding items or tasks that someone else can do.
If you don’t proactively schedule your week in advance, start now! Make sure you plan in some protected time every week to progress your business ideas.
Initiative management checklist
Reflect on how well you manage your time and your initiatives. Use my initiative management checklist below to highlight your strengths and weaknesses.
Put a check mark in the relevant Yes or No column against each statement.
If you do all the things on the above list, you’ll find that you’re better able to create the time and headspace to make your business ideas happen. And, as an added benefit, you’ll spend less time on the things that you don’t need to be doing.
Top tips for making your business ideas happen
- Identify potential obstacles, create solutions for them in advance. “When this happens, I will….”. If something is predictable, plan for it. Decide in advance what you’re going to do when it happens. Then, when it does occur, you’ll have already thought it through and will have a strategy ready to just get on and deal with it.
- Write a clear goal statement and keep it where you can see it every day. Include what you want to achieve, why, when you want to achieve it, and who’s involved. Your goal statement will also help you make better choices about what you will and won’t take on, and be more mindful about how you choose to focus your time and energy.
- Decide what the most important actions are – your “power moves”. Keep to a maximum of 5. Get super-clear on the activities that will take you towards your innovation goal and those that are just low-value busy-ness.
- Build ongoing momentum. Break your most important actions down into a series of micro-tasks. It’s better to do small things, and do a series of different small things consistently, than do nothing for a long time followed by a big one-off binge on your business idea. When you do the latter, you run the risk of not touching it again for a few weeks and losing the momentum to continue.
- Identify what only you can do and make sure that you only do those things, and nothing else, wherever possible. Anything else ideally should be delegated or outsourced. There might be some things you enjoy doing, but could delegate or pause for a while to create time to get your innovation off the ground.
- Remember that time flies. All these tips are about proactively making the time to bring your ideas to life and to put them into action. Otherwise, you may find that three months, six months, 12 months go by, and then when you stop and look back, you’re no further forward.
Next steps
I hope this helps you to work smarter and make your business ideas happen.
The world might be waiting to benefit from what you have to offer, and while there are never any guarantees of success, you’ll never know until you take action.
Don’t let opportunities pass you by. Put your innovation into action. And if you’d like any help, please let me know using our website contact form and I’ll be happy to chat and explore how we can help you with our innovation consulting expertise.
Good luck, and all the best with your business ideas.
