Risk & Business Magazine JGS Insurance Magazine Winter 2018 | Page 20

GREAT IDEAS NEED GREAT IMPLEMENTATION Great Ideas Need Great Implementation H aving a great idea doesn’t always guarantee you success. Being first to market doesn’t always guarantee you success either. What does work is something called implementation. The better you implement, the better your chances of success. Implementation is bringing your viable product or service to market with sufficient consumer awareness and confidence that your business becomes sustainable. There’s a lot of meat in that one sentence, so let me break it down for you, step by step. Implement means to do something. Take an action. Most businesses never get off the ground because the would-be entrepreneur never hatches his idea. Implementation is a leadership skill and leadership is crucial to the success of any business. Viable product or service means good enough to own from the customer’s perspective. Not crap, but not perfect 20 either. Perfection may not even be possible. If you’re a perfectionist, you will go broke before you ever go to market. Refinement is possible and that comes over time and usually with feedback from the customer. Consumer awareness and confidence means marketing to attract prospects and persuasion to convince them your product or service is the best thing since sliced bread. That’s when they buy and the resulting cash flow makes your business sustainable. Now this is really a simplistic overview. Implementation is more like hundreds of little things, but right now we have enough of a foundation to move on to … A HISTORY LESSON This is not a story about entrepreneurship. This is a story about two big corporations. But I want you to focus on the implementation of their ideas. Back in 1975 Sony introduced Betamax, a 35-pound box of analog electronics