I’m sorry to be the first to break this to you but your small business ideas are worth diddlysquat.

I know that comes as a shock because you were relying on at least one of them to provide for your pension.

Everyone at some stage in life has at least one “great idea”.  Now let me see, the current global population is heading north of 6 billion so that’s……….a lot of great ideas.

It’s a bit like saying that your lottery ticket is worth millions.  Well, yes, it might be if all six numbers come up on Saturday night.  What are the chances of that! (1 in 15,890,700 actually.) At least your £1 lottery ticket is in the game. At the moment your idea is just floating around in the ether so we can safely assume that it is currently worth less than £1.

If you don’t believe me, try going to a potential investor now, tell them about your idea and ask them to make you an offer for it.

To elevate your brilliant small business ideas to something of value you will need the following:

1. cash
2. entrepreneurial flare
3. some facts (as opposed to fiction)
4. sweat and toil

Unless you are willing and able to back your idea with hard earned cash you will need to convince someone else to part with theirs.  Trust me, no-one will invest in your idea.  They will only consider investing in something that can demonstrate some level of commercial reality.  In other words, you need to bring to the table an opportunity, not just an idea.  This is where the facts come in.

It isn’t any good telling a potential investor that you only need to sell 2% of the total market for widgets to breakeven.  If the world’s population stood on the Isle of Wight and jumped up at the same time it would sink.  Why aren’t we all quaking in our boots at that prospect?  Probably because we have figured out that the chances of this happening are fairly slim.

You must therefore demonstrate that the chances of your widget selling 2% of the total market are not slim.  And to do this you need to “do the idea”.  In other words you must find a way of creating the product – albeit on a small scale – and run real tests in real outlets on real customers.

“I have to rely on market research, it would be too difficult and too expensive to run product trials at this stage”.

Rubbish.  I’ll bet you my shirt that you can.  In 1999 three university mates spent a few hundred pounds on some fruit, converted them into a range of smoothies and sold them at a jazz festival in a London park.  Today, Innocent Drinks turnover is in excess of £80m.

The bottom line is this: An idea is just an idea.  Small business ideas are two a penny. The value lies in risking time, cash, sweat and toil to produce real products supplied into real outlets and bought by real consumers.

Oh and by the way, when you have achieved all that, the chances are that the guy with the money will have the lion’s share of the profits………..but that’s another story.

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