If there isn't an "Idea Coach" - there should be!

Category: Practice Building

Jeff Fuson commented on my Momentum post:

"... I tend to make great progress when I catch the wind and fly with new ideas and inspiration. However, as many entreprenuerial types my achille's heel is what Mike Litman calls the 'Idea Avalanche' where my brain cranks out so many possibilities that I may never really make headway on any one thing that is really viable/profitable.

How do you capture the momentum of the moment without relegating yourself to being 'snowed under' by the Idea Avalanche?"

Let me just say that, if there isn't an Idea Coach out there, I think there should be! There are plenty of coaches who help you stay focused and organize your business, but very few coaches actually work with highly entrepreneurial people, whose minds go into different directions, ready to explode any minute with the number of ideas they get every waking moment of the their lives!

When I was enrolled into Chris Barrow's "Get Your Year in Gear" program, he specifically stated: "I don't know how you, the entrepreneurial types, stay focused. I personally don't work with people like that." Or something along those lines...

Anyway, here are my two tricks that I picked up from my own experience and from my coach:

1. When I get an idea, I give it 3 days. If I am as excited about it and see just as much potential in it as I did 3 days ago, I start working on it. Many times I went to sleeping all excited about something I thought of, planning to start working on it immediately, only to wake up realizing it wasn't as good as I thought. Or it may be a lot more complicated than it appeared. If I wait a few days and it's still as appealing to me as when I thought of it, I go for it!

I dropped many projects this way, and moved on to something bigger. Something that was, perhaps, easier to implement or had a bigger payoff. Here are some of my projects that I put on hold for different reasons:

- Mastercoachingclass.com (couldn't see a long-term profit potential, but still plan to return to it)

- Coachingsyndicator.com (already paid the programmer, but realized it's bigger than I thought, decided to postpone until later)

- Makeyourcoachingsell.com (wanted to write a book, but then decided to postpone such a major project)

2. Ideas are dime a dozen, and I can't put them all into life. This is just not realistic. So what I decided to do this year is to focus on improving what I've got. After all, I put an enormous amount of time and efforts into creating ACCPOW for coaches. I might as well spend a little more time on improving it, adding personal touch, negotiating discounts for members, etc.

I've also spent months developing AssessmentGenerator, and it only makes sense to keep improving it, adding new features, providing better customer service, finding new joint venture possibilities, collecting success stories and testimonials etc.

The truth is, I've got more products than I could ever imagine I'd create! When I wrote my first e-book, I was soooooo protective of it! I kept worrying that I put my entire arsenal of knowledge into this e-book, and that I could never write another one! Now I don't know what to do with new product ideas!

So I decided to concentrate on what I've got and stop looking for new product ideas. Really focus on fine-tuning what I already built. That's my 2005 strategy.