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Posts Tagged ‘cycle of creation’
In business, change is your only constant so you must constantly create Monday, November 15th, 2010
Stagnation in business is a leading factor in business failure. The fact is, in life, change is your only constant and about your only guarantee. The challenge for business owners is to be prepared for this, regardless of your current successes. The market doesn’t care about your track record or past wins, it doesn’t even care if you are doing well right now. The market only wants demands met by supply. Once some of these are met, it will move on to others and often leave the old demands in the past.
There is no long term “pension” reward for past work in the marketplace, its all about current supply meeting up with current demands. Well folks, if you supply something great today, it may not be so tomorrow unless you are ready for the constant of change! I mean, the prime example of a failure to prepare for change is the vast majority of mortgage brokers. One day, you are making half-a-mil a year and the next, you are filing bankruptcy, losing your assets and saying “why me!?” It doesn’t mean business who are prepared for change do not experience any downswing, only that it doesn’t cripple them and they are also preparing for their next upswing.
The only way to adapt to this change is to be constantly creating. You must continually spend time specifically flushing out ideas, executing on some of them, adapting services, adding new ones, diversifying old ones and generally “tweaking” your business. Having a system in place to work through ideas will allow you to make change in your business a constant that keeps up with and meets the change guaranteed by life. Some simple steps start with creating time on a weekly basis to look at your ideas and make plans for action on them. What is the next step? Part of this time is spent simply vetting out new ideas and deciding on viability and priority, the rest is spent deciding how to implement the top ones and then you simply must do what you decide.
There you go, on a weekly basis, do the following:
- Get all the ideas out there and vet out their viability and priority
- Decide on the immediate next steps for the top ideas and those you are actively working on
- Now finish with all this pie-in-the-sky planning time and get down to getting this stuff done!!
Taking time to make change in your business as constant as change in life will create sustainability within your business and ensure your “best-year” will always be the one you are in!
Upcoming Training on Implementing a Cycle of Creation in your Business
Our Cycle of Creation event is coming up in Salt Lake on December 9th and 10th. You can check out details for the event and register for that as well by visiting here.
Cycle of Creation
Thursday, October 28th, 2010
I am not good at drawing so don't make fun of me.
I am not good at drawing so don't make fun of me.
When you have a new idea for your business, one of the first things you may ask yourself is how do I implement it? When the answer isn’t readily apparent to us, we usually just proceed to do nothing. One of the best creators and innovators that I have personally been in contact with is my good friend Garrett B Gunderson. He has a process for idea creation that he calls “Cycle of Creation” that I wanted to talk about today.
Cycle of creation goes through the process of having an idea and taking that idea to a place where it can be delivered to the market. The process is fairly straightforward as you will see:
Step 1: Your Idea- OK you probably have guessed as much already but it starts with your idea. This shouldn’t be any idea. It should be an idea that you have already identified is in alignment with your Soul Purpose as well as your companies values. If it isn’t in alignment, don’t waste your time.
Step 2: The Concept- This is the stage where you start to communicate your idea and either share it with your existing team or start to think about who can help you with implementation. Also during this stage you want to start thinking about how this can be implemented effectively. Should the idea be presented in the form of a physical product, event or one-to-one implementation as just a few examples. This is where you want to make sure you have buy in from your team so that you can implement.
Step 3: Framework- How’s the idea ultimately going to be built? Do you need more people? Is there technology that needs to be in place. Has the product or service been outlined in terms of content? In this stage you will want to identify: Who’s involved with delivering and implementing. What delivery method you will use. What the actual content is. Timeline for delivery. Target client and what they are looking for in a product. You should also be very certain that this new idea adds to your business and does not detract from it.
Step 4: Marketplace- This is where you start putting the idea into the market to see who is interested and how successful it will be. During this stage, we use a concept called “Win Then Play”. This means that before you spend thousands of dollars manufacturing, creating beautiful websites etc., test your ideas to see if people will buy before you actually create the entire thing. The idea here is to not waste time creating something that nobody actual wants.
There are the 4 steps for implementing your idea. The key concepts being that your business and purpose are aligned with the idea and that you can win then play before fully launching your product. This saves you time and money and, if you master this process, you will have more products available to your client base as well.
If you aren’t sure how to scrub your ideas
We have a call coming up next week, November 4th on how to effectively scrub your ideas. You can register for the call here http://ideacreation.eventbrite.com.
If you really want some personalized attention on idea generation and implementation
Our Cycle of Creation event is coming up in Salt Lake on December 9th and 10th. You can check out details for the event and register for that as well by visiting here.