Here’s a guide to finding opportunities within your own realm of talents and interests:
Look for Opportunities
How do you find a new product or service, recognizing that 80 percent or more will be new in five years? Here’s a series of ideas. Number one, begin with yourself. Begin with your own talents, your abilities, your experience, knowledge, interests, background, education and so on. Look carefully at your current work, your current business, your current position, or your current product or service. Seek for what is called your own acres of diamonds. Look under your own feet.
Look Into Yourself
Here’s a question. What qualities account for your greatest successes in life so far? What personal qualities and abilities have gotten you to where you are? And how could you apply those qualities and abilities to starting and building a new business?
If you already have a company, ask what are your company’s talents, abilities, experience, knowledge, interests, background and so on. What qualities, talents and abilities have enabled your company to succeed up to now? Where can you specialize? Where can you make a difference?
Identify What You Really Enjoy
Number two is to look for a product or service about which you can become really enthusiastic. Sometimes people become wealthy by translating or transforming their hobbies into a business. You will be most successful doing something or marketing something that you really love.
Every product must have a champion. Every product or service must have someone in the business who really, really loves the product or service and is eager to get out and tell other people about it.
Improve on Something Else
Number three, look for something that’s an improvement on an existing product or service, not something brand new. Look for something that’s cheaper or better quality. Something that has additional features or functions. Look for something that’s an improvement.
Remember, improving an existing successful product or service is the fastest and surest way to build a successful business. An idea only needs to be 10 percent new and better to capture substantial market share. Brand-new products or services are very risky.
Be Willing to Work Hard
The fourth key to finding a new product or service is this: Don’t look for easy money. Don’t look for gimmicks or useless knickknacks. Don’t look for get-rich-quick schemes or rewards without working, because there aren’t any.
More people have wasted more time, more of their life and more money trying to find quick ways to make easy money than you can possibly imagine. So be willing to put in a lot of hard work before you start making real money in a business.
Success Takes Time
It takes two years to break even in the average business. It takes four years to show a profit. It takes maybe eight to 10 years before it starts to generate real cash flow. So you have to be patient. If you’re impatient, what will happen is you’ll end up setting yourself further back than you can imagine.
Action Exercises
First, be prepared to research a lot of business ideas before you make a final decision. The first 10 percent of time that you spend doing your homework will save you 90 percent of the effort getting results later on.
Second, look for something that you can improve upon rather than something new. You’re surrounded by ideas and opportunities for improvement–if you can just identify them.
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