Step 20 - Testing the Idea

Step 20 - Testing the Idea

You may have gathered by now that being in business is a creative process that requires ideas and ingenuity to kept the business alive, fresh growing and to put it bluntly solvent!

You are likely to fall into one of 2 camps:

• You are not creative and find it difficult to come up with new ideas and fresh ways of thinking about things.
• You have too many ideas and are scattered, don’t know how to prioritise and butterfly from thing to thing all too easily

Here are some solutions for each:

You are not creative

Your starting point will be to get the book “How to Have Kick-Ass Ideas" by Chris Barez- Brown. ISBN 0-00-722094-4 This will really help you get your creativity flowing.

Remember it is not about having lots of ideas, it’s about having 1 or 2 really good ones.

Get a group of creative people to help you brainstorm issues and questions about business that you have. If you do this, go in with an open mind and a zipped mouth!  You cannot say, “yes but it wont work because……” How many attempts did it take for George Orwell to get Animal Farm published? Many tens if not hundreds! Listen to the ideas of others and allow them to land. Give them lots of consideration before dismissing them. Perhaps test them out. See below- Testing the idea

You have too many ideas

If like me you have too many ideas and you jump straight into them as the next best thing/ the perfect solution or the absolute winner, pause and allow an incubation period of at least 24 hours if not a week.

Then if they still seem like a good idea, test them out in a small way, before going full blown into them.

Testing the idea

Define the idea accurately

Make a prediction of what results you would hope to expect

Put the idea into action in a small way with a test bed (small group of people)

Measure the results

Decide whether to take the idea further

Measuring the results

This is an area that can be easy or hard depending on the systems you have in place.

If for example you have a special offer, give it a code and ensure that people have to give that code when responding to your special offer.

If you make a change on your website and you want to see if that has made a difference make a note of the date of the change and check with google analytics to see how many hits you are getting on your site, what pages are being viewed and how long people are staying on your site.

Google analytics is a free tool you can add to your website easily to get these stats.

http://www.google.com/analytics/

We will be looking at tools such as Google analytics that will help you manage and monitor your business in the next Guiding Principle.

Good luck!

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