Those of us who are somewhat business-minded will relate to the position of having a great business idea in your mind that just doesn’t seem to leave the mind. For one reason or another, we just can’t seem to bring the idea out of our dreams and into real life. Let’s discuss 5 relatable reasons why this may be the case for you and what you can do to overcome each of these reasons.

Idea too big

I see this one a lot and I can admit to being guilty of it too. You have a great idea, you start visualising the idea and think about launching it. You see the business grow, 100 customers, 1000 customers, 10000 customers and now you’re thinking about how you will handle 10000 customers. You think about the working capital requirement, the investment, the premises you will have to rent and the taxes. And suddenly your non-existent business idea has become too much for you. The best advice I can give to overcome this comes from Howard Schultz in his book Onward where he talks about the journey to making Starbucks coffee what it is today. While they serve thousands if not millions of cups of coffee daily, Schultz’s principle is to focus on making one excellent cup of coffee and repeat. It is my sincerest hope that your business will serve 10000 customers, even 1 million. You will however serve them one at a time. And that is all you need to do.

Idea too complex

This is another one I see a lot and it can get very messy. You have a business idea that has so many moving parts and so many technicalities that it is very difficult to get off the ground let alone explain to someone at a braai. Just so we are clear complex business ideas are not bad, at all. It is usually cases where the complexities involve a human touch, for example, expert-led business ideas that are also very time-consuming. A bespoke dressmaker is a good example of this especially if you insist on handmaking the dresses. Nothing wrong with that. However, ideas like this do not scale very well because you only have 24 hours in a day. You really cannot increase this without changing the business formula and many just don’t want to. To solve this problem reconsider your process and see what can be changed to make the business simple and work better. The example I gave was only to explain a time consuming complex business, bespoke dressmaking is a great business idea. Vera Wang makes only four wedding dresses a year and charges hundreds of Thousands for them but I can guarantee you she did not start this way.

Waiting for funding

Ah, funding old friend is that you? Well, there are a lot of people waiting for you so they can start their business. I really could’ve started with this one. I suppose it relates to all the issues I will bring up here. Granted some businesses need a huge capital outlay and there is absolutely no getting around that. However, for many ideas, you may have made the idea too big or complicated it such that you think it needs huge funding when it really doesn’t. How much do you need to serve one customer? While I’m not encouraging you to start your restaurant with one tomato as the joke goes, I’m certainly not stopping anyone from doing it

Something is missing

It is easiest for me to make this point through a personal story. Being a music lover who enjoys a lot of Zimbabwean produced music over the years I have heard and perhaps participated in the butchering of lyrics to many of our songs. Shona has somewhere around 14 dialects and that is just one of 14 languages spoken in Zimbabwe. Also knowing about web design my great idea to solve this was a Zimbabwean music lyrics website. Why it hadn’t been done baffled me but the idea was perfect. The rising popularity of YouTube lyric videos with Zimbabwean artists confirmed this. It would be high traffic with many advertising opportunities and all you had to do was get the correct lyrics and house them. But something just didn’t feel right. After finally deciding to embark on the idea my research finally answered why nobody else was doing it. Lyrics, just like songs are protected under copyright and songwriters or publishers can claim royalties from their use. This is obviously a hurdle this idea could not get over save entering agreements with artists and publishers. Perhaps your idea has this sort of problem that something is missing. Research and practice are the answer. If research does not reveal what is missing practice will. Having a copyright claim in court is a very expensive way to find out what is missing so I hope the research will do it for you.

Fear of failure

This is one that many will not cite as their reason but I’m sure they will relate to. Fear of failure is a rational fear after all. What if it doesn’t work? What if people aren’t enthusiastic about my product? What if I get zero customers? These are all valid questions and compounded by the burden of having invested only to find yourself with nothing to show for it. Three things can be done to get you through this. Firstly market research to evaluate how real your fear is. Secondly planning. Business plans have been viewed as the pain of doing business in the modern era but business plans are guides to help you get things right. Finally, find customer number one, serve customer number one and learn from customer number one. I recall my experience with a sales team that struggled to sell a compliance product. After one week with only one sale, I dug deeper into the buyer details and found they were in insurance. We turned around and focussed our efforts on financial services companies and the following the same team confirmed 8 sales. If you can get one customer you have all the information you need to get more.

I hope I have touched on at least one reason that you relate to and the solution has been communicated clearly to you. If you have a reason which didn’t feature here get in touch via the comments and we can discuss.