How to find and grow ideas for your business

Part of any business will have growth plans from time to time. On that journey you are also going to hit ceilings along the way, find problems you have never seen before. It's been happening for hundreds of years and will continue to.

So how do you find and grow ideas for your business?

Early days: I just Googled it

I started my career as an IT professional, installing all sorts of systems and hardware. If it plugged into a power point, it was my problem. Do you think I knew all of the answers? Nope, but I was good at Googling things and I was (still am) an early adopter.

After a while, the marketers of the world started to work out how to use Mr Google and intercepted this way of finding quick answers. Google is now a lot smarter (but the amount of online content is overflowing), so you have to ask much better questions to get good answers.

Today: I have to read it

Google was not giving me the answers I wanted (or maybe I didn't ask the best questions).

How do you read when you are totally dyslexic and it literally takes you months to read a book? Well, you Google that and BOOM, all of a sudden you can just about listen to every book under the sun. I was stoked. I could now ride my bike or go for a 20km walk and listen to an entire book.

Whose information are you reading?

This got me to thinking, who is writing the books and who is coming up with that information? Lets be honest, it's generally just regurgitated from someone else in their new words. I remember saying to one of my school friends who scored about 100/100 in her TER, "you're not even that smart – you can't make a pizza." She was incredibly book smart, but that's where she spent all of her time. I'm sure she could read about how to make a pizza and write it down in an exam.

She's probably a well-rounded person today, but see what I'm saying? Who informs the informers? Why should we listen to them? After all, we are all a big bag of thoughts. It's more about who can interpret, evolve and apply the best thoughts in their own way, to new situations. These people are the ones I want to learn from.

So now it's time to add your own thoughts to paper

So after doing all the self-educating, training, reading and talking, you then eventually have to start making some assumptions and putting pen to paper, and as I like to say: GSSD (get some shit done). It's by far the best way and also the method I used in my early days, as I found reading very hard. I would just do it.

You can spend all of your time listening to what someone else has to say or you can just get it done. You might stuff up the first time, but you will then own it. If you just copy someone else or read it you will never work out how to apply these lessons on your own. You need to own it, build it, then delegate it.

Let's finish on this point. While I'm all for cutting corners and getting to the finish line, you still have to do the hard work. And there's nothing wrong with asking for help. Doing that could save you a lot of time and money. If you want to grow and you have a vision, give us a call. I can tell you that the 10,000 hours we've spent in HubSpot will save you a lot in the long run and our one-day workshop is an epic way to begin.