All Great Ideas Are Dangerous

“All Great Ideas Are Dangerous.” – Oscar Wilde

Admit it:  You have a great idea.  Maybe you’ve shared it with someone else, maybe you’ve sketched something on a cocktail napkin and maybe you’ve kept it all to yourself, but still – you have a great idea for something.  The dangerous part of the great idea isn’t having it; it’s doing something about it.  “Grip it and rip it” is fine on the golf course when all you risk is losing your ball in the rough.  Go back to your bag and get another one.  People who can shrug their shoulders and go back to their bag for the resources to start all over in business are rare.  Most only get their one shot, for better or worse.

“To turn really interesting ideas and fledgling technologies into a company that can continue to innovate for years, it requires a lot of disciplines.” – Steve Jobs

Few people have great ideas that they can implement on their own.  Indeed, subscribers to personality theory (think Meyers-Briggs, DISC, True Colors, etc.) will agree that the kind of person that can come up with a particular idea sometimes isn’t the best person to implement it.  So you need help – and in order to get someone to help you, you need to be able to tell them exactly what it is that you propose doing.  Your help comes from many sources:  Financers, Organizers, Planners, Laborers, Implementers, etc. and they all need to know what you want to do with your great idea.  The document that contains all that information is your business plan.

A good business plan removes a lot of the dangers from your great idea.  It helps keep your business on track, eliminating the “scope creep” that you see in some projects where costs spiral out of control because other items keep getting added.  It helps prove that you have really thought your idea through to its logical conclusion – something that your banker needs to know before he/she lends you the money to pay for it.  It also helps remind you what you were thinking in the first place.  Sometimes that great idea is like a dream that you can’t quite remember after waking – when you write it down, you can go back to it in its original form time and time again.

A good business plan will prompt you to think about (and allow others to fully understand) the business and ownership structure, the experience of management, industry factors, marketing strategies, financial projections and much more.  Some ideas that sounded good will sometimes fizzle when thinking through all the parts of the business plan.  Other ideas are solidified and the owner walks away more confident than ever that his idea really does have merit.