Don’t Lose Your Focus!
At Intrigo, we pride ourselves on challenging our clients to strengthen their ideas and business plans, and this often involves brainstorming ideas that we think can supplement the work that our clients have already done. It’s part of what has made us successful over the past two years, but it also can lead to some challenges. That’s because new ideas generally beget more new ideas. To borrow from IBM’s commercials, when you spend all your time “idea-ating”, you don’t actually get anything done.
As an emerging business, your focus and determination are everything. Being an entrepenuer means working at least twice as hard as someone working for an established company. You generally have a list of to-dos, with more added to that list than gets accomplished each day. And while it’s incredibly important to keep honing your strategy and your ideas, you can’t ever lose focus on the reason why you started out in the first place. To give you an example, one of our current clients is working on a social utility whose major market is college students. We suggested the idea of building a Facebook application in order to more quickly generate their user base, and to try to counteract the competition of Facebook. Well in the course of our presentation, we went through a number of the most used Facebook apps, talked about the reasons why they were successful, and why Intrigo thought their business model could translate onto Facebook.
Well, two meetings later they came back with ideas for four new Facebook applications, none of which had any real connection to their initial business model. They had momentarily lost their focus, and had they continued down this path they would have partially crippled their ability to pursue their initial plan and model.
This group is one that is under intense pressure and scrutiny from their investment group, which happens to be one that has not invested in their type of company before. Thus the investors are somewhat fearful of the business model, especially the Twitter like model of building a user base first, building a revenue model second. Thus when Facebook presented itself as another area for growth and possible revenues, they shifted their focus onto Facebook and its opportunities, rather than continuing their focus on their actual business that they had actual investors for.
So, here are the lessons to be learned from this.
1. Write your mission and goals as soon as you can. Memorize them, recite them to yourself throughout the day. You started your business because you have a passion for it, and what you’re trying to do. Make sure you remember that.
2. As an entrepenuer, you only have so much time throughout the day. It’s an immense challenge to build your company, don’t distract yourself from your goals.
3. When you come up with an idea, ask yourself whether or not it fits your goals. If it doesn’t, put it on the back burner for a little while. If it’s a good idea you can come back to it. Just don’t try to launch two companies at the same time.
4. Don’t be ruled by fear. You started your business because you believed in it. Don’t allow pressure to lead you astray from your mission. Believe in it, work hard, that’s what gives you the best chance to succeed.
Being a start-up is never as easy as you would like it to be. Don’t forget that, and don’t ever forget the reasons why you started in the first place. That passion and inspiration are the only things that can carry you through the tough times and on to the pathway to success.
*In case you are wondering, we’re currently in the process of starting to develop one of those Facebook applications for our client. We worked it into a promotional tool and feature of their current application, so we’re working to build it as a new piece of their model. But I think that’s a whole other blog post.
