Are you ready to work ON your business and change things up?  Take your business to the next level?  Start that side business you have dreamed of but been too busy with life?  You’ve been thinking about it for a long time, it’s been on the to do list.  What will it take to actually get it rolling?  What is the list of reasons you’ve made to not do it now?  Part of what we believe in at M!NC MAGIC is the importance of starting.  There is a time for planning and strategizing and  a time for process, competitive and market research and analysis. That said it’s important to note this saying.

Good, better, best,
Never let it rest,
Until the good is better and the better is the best!

It’s hard to know if that quote is by professional basketball player Tim Duncan or St. Jerome (the patron saint of translators, librarians and encyclopedists).  Either way it’s one of my favorites.  Maya Angelou writes on this too: “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” Both of these ideas pay tribute to one of my important beliefs in business.  Make it happen.  Book that meeting.  Done is MUCH better than perfect.  Good enough.  I’m a big believer in getting that treadmill going because that is exactly where clarity, ideas and momentum starts.

Getting Started

No one says it better than Nike with their “Just do it” slogan.  It really can be that simple.  A perfect example is our Catapult Catalyst program.  It literally sat stewing in the cogs of my brain nearly since M!NC started over 10 years ago.  I had lots of ideas, voice memos on my phone that I wouldn’t forget, conversations with potential partners, written content for the program.  I would sit for hours at a time when inspiration hit and it would keep me up at night.  And then time squeezed in, I noticed others doing retreats and I thought, ah let it go.  I did let it go for many years until one night in May 2018.  I have a few theories on why at that moment it reawakened but it did and with such force.  Within 3 months, the program launched and grew extraordinarily….just like a child that was meant to be conceived.

Limiting Risk

Being a business owner one has to take risks but risks should be calculated.  Believe it or not this is all the more reason to just run a test to see if the idea can work.  Say a new product on an ecommerce website, or a new service for a dentist.  It doesn’t have to be a huge ordeal to offer this to select clients.  You can put it on a private page on your site and offer it only to clients on your newsletter list as a VIP offer.  You can offer dental whitening as a service by bringing in a technician rather than investing in equipment/training to see if it works.  All you have to do is:

• Try. Yes, the infamous beta test.  Where you do a soft launch or offer on a program, business idea, focus group, survey.  Nothing is stopping you but yourself.  Regret is a much heavier burden than you know.
• Try, try again. Congrats!  You did a test.  Maybe you failed, that doesn’t matter.  What matters is that you did it and learned from it?  Can you make it better?  Can you try again with some adjustments?  Or did you learn it won’t work but it led to a new idea.  Think about the microwave.
• Think of Thomas Edison.  10,000 attempts it took him. Don’t give up unless you have to.  Adjust as you need to, but if something is sticking with you, driving you, work with it.  Practice makes perfect…..even for paddle boarding.

We believe that growth and innovation are  necessary components to business and to personal happiness.  Instead of thinking about risks and why all the time, why not focus on why not?   M!NC MAGIC practices this all the time.