subject: Win Then Play In Business [print this page] Win Then Play In Business Win Then Play In Business
When it comes to ideas and whether or not you should move forward, it comes down to weighing the risk of losing money, time and other resources to pursue the idea. The key is to minimize your risk by gauging the success of the product/service idea before it launches. We call this "Win Then Play".
This concept to me is a little like dating before you get married. Dating is a process of building a relationship with someone while deciding if there is a long term future with that person. Win then play is often the same, we want to spend some time with our idea and feel good about moving forward into a bigger commitment. The best part about this relationship is that, unlike marriage, if your ideas only work half the time, you're actually doing pretty good!
Winning with an idea for you business can come in the following forms:
Revenue: Generating revenue with the idea before the product/service is released. You can do this by pre-selling a product/service before it has been created to see what the interest is.
Improve efficiency: Does the idea, when put in place, make your organization more efficient and therefore warrant you moving forward with it?
Save on costs: Does the idea allow you to save costs in some way? For instance going from a hard copy product to a product in digital format. This can also be a new manufacturing technique that allows you to produce more efficiently.
Once you have established some positives about your idea, you can then move forward with investing more money, time and resources in the project. This also ensures that you don't waste valuable resources for your business on ideas that have no chance of helping your business be successful.
Testing product/service ideas is nothing new but it's amazing how much time business owners waste on perfecting something that they aren't sure is even viable even when they know they should test the idea. If you have ideas that you haven't moved forward with ask yourself how you can go about creating more certainty around the idea to empower you to move forward with it.
