Why your ideas never go anywhere

I recently met with a small bespoke travel agent business. They took me through their typical client journey - all of the processes, tools and people involved at each stage.

They were seeking out unknown unknown better ways of working. They told me about all the things they’d tried in the past and why, for one reason or another, they hadn't stuck. They told me about the ideas that had been sat on a shelf for months, years.

Ideas that seemed radical, maybe even outlandish, and quite possibly game-changing.

But ideas that felt impossible to start - because there just weren’t enough hours in the day.

You don’t need more ideas

If you’re running a small business or charity, and you share a challenge with an advisor or peer, most people will offer well-meaning ideas on how to fix it.

But the clients I work with already have plenty of ideas to improve how they do things.

The challenge isn’t in coming up with solutions, and they don’t need someone to tell them what better looks like. I see this across all of the clients I work with - from solo entrepreneurs to 50 person businesses.

The challenge is not being able to get started on the ideas they have.

And in my experience, that happens for 3 reasons.

There's no time

As in the case of the travel agent, they’re victims of their own success.

They’re regularly busy month on month. Great for cashflow, but not for implementing changes that require thought, consideration and extra effort.

Small businesses, which make up 99% of registered businesses in the UK, take a lot to run. Often, even with the best ideas in the world, there is just not enough time to start making them happen.

Many entrepreneurs need to use their evenings and weekends to work "on the business" instead of "in the business" - doing things that aren’t strictly required to keep things running, but are the only ways to move onward and upward into better. Indeed, small business owners work on average 45.5 hours per week, and more than half work either six or seven days per week (source).

With new ideas, we ideally want to set aside “proper” time to give it a fair shot, and give the idea the best chance possible. But when we’re trying to develop something new, it can feel like we’re awkwardly crowbarring it into our already packed schedule.

It's unclear where to start

My partner’s sister has recently decided to develop her freelance offering as a medical consultant and turn it into a small business.

She’s been taking proactive steps and making strides with the idea - winning new contracts along the way.

And now that she’s given herself permission to be her own boss, she’s seeing business opportunities everywhere!

Beyond utilising her existing professional skills as a consultant, there’s also an underserved wine bar audience in her local village, and a niche clothing line that her existing clients would clamour for.

We were having lunch recently, and she explained that she has so many ideas, and is keen to put words into action, but just needs to know which of them are worth paying attention to. As someone with about a million notes on my phone for business ideas, I can absolutely relate to this.

Entrepreneurs are often multi-talented doers who are skilled and confident enough to go after opportunities, even if it’s not something they have experience in.

This can lead to great things, but when faced with so many possibilities, it can leave us paralysed and unable to move forward.

"What if it doesn't work?"

When I teach Entrepreneurship & Innovation to degree apprentice students, we discuss why businesses struggle to innovate. There are the obvious academic reasons: lack of money, time, knowledge or skills. These do apply in many cases.

But the more human and honest reason is that we’re scared.

Small businesses find innovation especially challenging. Not only is there never enough time, and you never feel like you know enough, but any kind of change requires a further discomfort that you often just don’t have the bandwidth for.

When I ran my tech agency we found this kind of change especially difficult. I had more of an appetite for change than most, but some of our team had come from workplaces that demonised failure and pointed the finger when things went wrong, meaning they were very risk-averse.

To change how we did things in any meaningful way, even if that change could lead to improvement for everyone, would mean a period of disruption. Things might feel like they get worse before they get better.

And what if the idea doesn’t even work? What would that say about us as leaders, how would we keep going after that kind of failure?

The start is when we know the least

One client of mine, who I’ve worked with for several years, is starting to embrace a new way of thinking. That they’ll never have the time, knowledge or certainty that they'd ideally want to start implementing new ideas.

There’s 40 of them in the business, and their website is the backbone of the customer experience. Therefore every department has an opinion about what should be prioritised: marketing, new business, operations, finance, customer experience. Ideas come from all angles, often with their potential measured with completely different yardsticks.

How do you know which ideas are worth spending time and money on? Which are worth upskilling for? Which are worth researching and planning?

After working with me, they still seek to address these questions, but as a way to enable first steps, not to seek out certainty.

I’ve worked with them to run open discussions about ideas for the website, encouraging cross-departmental discussion and teasing out everyone’s gripes and suggestions.

Together, we prioritised using a weighted matrix, to shortlist which ideas are going to make the biggest impact.

Of course, our old blockers still linger:

• There isn't enough time to do them all now.
• We don't know how to put them into practice yet.
• We’re not sure which ideas will pay off.

But we’re accepting these unknowns and carrying them with us. As we progress we’ll learn more, adapt, course correct. We’ll figure out what works and what doesn’t.

As long as we start moving, we’ll always know more about these ideas than we did yesterday.

Discomfort is where innovation lives

Many leaders avoid uncertainty at all costs, forgetting that uncertainty was how they got here in the first place.

Now that their business is established and they have a good handle on day to day operations, they lose sight of what it felt like in the early days - back when they were knee deep in unknowns on a daily basis. When they had no choice but to wade through and figure it out on the fly.

I've been there - many times - and I get it. Who wants to leave comfort and safety and walk into the unknown? But that discomfort is where real innovation lives - without discomfort and uncertainty, we’re just doing more of the same.

So we start. Small steps. Today.

We’re not starting because we know everything now and it feels right.

We’re starting because we want to learn more about our idea, learn how it can work, and use it to be better.

You don’t need more ideas. You don’t even need more time, knowledge or certainty.

You just need to start.