“It’s amazing how long it can take to see the obvious.”
Ian Stewart, author, Nature’s Numbers

When you’re launching a new business venture or project, it helps to start with the very best ideas right from the beginning. The very best ideas are unique, innovative, and robust. But how can you tell if your ideas meet these criteria?

To find out, you’ll need to answer these five bulletproofing questions:

1. Who are your target customers?
2. What problem are you solving for your customers?
3. What must change about the status quo for your idea to succeed?
4. How will customers know you’ve “delivered the goods?”
5. How does your idea contribute to your business success?

Do this together with one or more of your colleagues or advisors. Keep your responses short and sweet: give yourself no more than 15 words and 15 seconds to get your answers across. Consider asking some of your potential customers to help out. Most of all, apply the “Three R’s” of bulletproofing: Review, Revise, Repeat.

A conclusion is where you stopped thinking.
originalthinking

When you bulletproof your ideas using this approach, two important things will happen:

• By taking the customer’s point of view right from the start, you’ll expose hidden strengths and weaknesses in your business ideas that would otherwise go unnoticed until too late
• Secondly, you’ll discover a dramatic improvement in how well you grasp your customers’s real needs so that you can improve your ideas to lead to profitable solutions that actually make a difference

For more insight to using the five bulletproofing questions outlined here, read Bulletproofing Your Business Ideas (coming shortly).

“All my life I wanted to be a somebody. Now I realize I needed to be more specific.”
Lily Tomlin

There are a million obvious reasons for business leaders and entrepreneurs to ‘do planning’ but there is really only one reason to create a plan, and that’s to communicate something important to others who need to know. And if there’s one thing we know in business, there are always a lot of people who need or want to know about what you have planned for the future.

Ultimately, deciding whether to spend a lot of precious time and attention on planning depends almost entirely on two things:

1. How much risk you can handle
2. How efficiently that risk must be managed for the venture to succeed

The decision of whether to produce a plan depends on who and how many people you need to communicate with about what needs to be done, by whom, when, and where, how much of it, and to what standards.

Quite often, the planners of a venture already know ‘in their head’ much of what will go into the business plan (this is true for almost any kind of strategic planning). However, the actual development of the business plan document greatly helps to clarify purpose and ensure that key stakeholders are all “on the same page.”

Frequently, the ‘customer’ for the plan is yourself. Consider that the actual process of producing a plan will expose many things that can help or hinder your path forward, and can be invaluable in shaping the strategies that will help you reach your goals.

“Hope is not a strategy, luck is not a plan.”
originalthinking

So, deciding whether or not to plan should be a forgone conclusion for anyone who hopes to succeed in business – as long as you use judgement in fitting the task to the need.

If you want more information, read business planning basics for more discussion of when to plan and what a good business plan should contain.

“More isn’t better, it’s just more.”
originalthinking

When it comes to making things simpler, less is almost always better.

The simpler your ’story’, the more quickly and easily your target audiences – investors, employees, customers, and suppliers alike – will grasp how you can help them reach their goals… and the more likely they’ll be to help you with meeting yours.

But simple is hard. One of the biggest challenges faced by every entrepreneur is making their new and visionary ideas simple enough for others to easily understand and embrace. Still, if history is any guide, the task is worth the effort.