Risk & Business Magazine Miller 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