Part 4 - Validating Your Business Idea For Million Dollar Success

Welcome to this edition of the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Weidell. Hi, this is Larry Weidel. And we're talking about today we can take a time out and talk about how to validate a business idea with million dollar potential. You want to make a million dollars, you want to do a build your own business, you want it to be big. Well, let's just see how you do that. So if you've got your eyes set on hitting seven figures with your business, you're in the right place. Because today we're going to dive into one of the most important questions for any entrepreneur. And that is how do you know if your business idea can turn into a million dollar success? Validation is key. Before you start pouring time and energy into your business, you're excited about it. The main thing is are you excited about it? But when you go through the checklist, you see if it can sustain, your passion can sustain. Either it grows or, or the air starts to go out of your inspiration there. So you want to do the validation before you start pouring time and money into your venture. And so we're going to walk through these steps. It's kind of like a checklist. And if I'm boring you, don't just say, I got that covered, just pat yourself on the back. Because we're just going to go through the steps to ensure you're on the right track, give you kind of a track to run off. First of all, you want to define the problem clearly. Is it significant? And is this something that is important, urgent? Is it pervasive? Are people actively out there trying to figure this thing out and who's affected? How big is this market, how your target, you hear this target market size and how much pain is created in your target market by not having a solution to this thing. You want to see if you have a viable large scale customer base. And so then you want to analyze that market demand and size and you let some conduct, conduct some market research how you do these things. There are all of these things we're going to walk through are things that you can follow up, that people have spent lots of time built, businesses analyzing and explaining. And so the look, this is kind of a checklist for you. If you don't have it solved, you don't have anybody who can do it for you. You can start following up. So you want to, and this is the second Main point, analyze your market demand and size. And so you do that with market research. And there are tools out there that you may or may not be aware of, like Google Trends Statista and there's industry reports to assess market size and trends. Before I went to North Carolina in 1979, I wanted to see the raw material of our business back then is people. We were in the people business, financial services. And we wanted to build a bunch of offices doing financial planning for middle income people. And so I wanted to go to a hub, I wanted to be a center of activity. So I got, I don't know how, I went to the library. You'll find if you get interested in your brain kicks in with your subconscious and all of a sudden you become this genius at getting information about this thing. But you need to check it out. This is what I did before I went to North Carolina and this is a key to me being able to get. First year I fumbled and stumbled and only recruited about 56 people. But once I got my feet on the ground, I got a little core group together. We went on the warpath and recruited 1800 7215,000 people, a total about 25, 23, 4 or 5,000 people in about three and a half years. And I could not have done that if I'd moved to Fruit Stand Iowa, someplace where there's only four people. You have to be in the middle of people. And this happened to me. We moved from. I was in Atlanta, Georgia and I didn't want to move. That was where the headquarters were at the time. And I did not want to be too far away from the home base. And so I went halfway between Washington D.C. and Atlanta. And so the biggest convention center, the biggest hub was in Greensboro, North Carolina. About a million people there. And then a half, two hours down the road there was about a million people in Charlotte. Hour and a half east was a, another million people in Raleigh, Durham area. And so I had plenty of people. I40, you look at Intercept in that kind of business, you know, you where can people get to you? So I 40 went across the state, I 85 went north and south and was the intersection of two major interstates. So I analyzed it and it was the 50 biggest population center in the United States. And I found that out from the Statistical Analytical magazine that was put out studying population areas in the United States and how much incomes were. We dealt with middle income people. So I had to get into a hub of middle income people. And I found out in North Carolina they had more middle income towns 15 to 20,000 where I could put in an office and we could expand the whole state in offices just in that one state. So great fertile ground for what I was all about. And that gave me my enough. I didn't beat myself to death, but they gave me enough energy to know that if I did my job right, the market was there. That's what you got to do. You got to find out is the market going to be there for what you're wanting to do. So you analyze your market and that may take a lot of time, may take no time whatsoever. May be obvious. In my situation, it was obvious. We work with families, they have financial problems, they have financial needs well established. So we didn't have to do a lot of market research. You may or may not, but if you need to do it, do it. And thanks for listening to the Million Dollar Mastermind. Now if you like the episode, don't forget to subscribe, share it with friends. Friends, leave a comment and I will see you next time. And so then you want to calculate how much money can you make? How many sales can you make in those markets? And what are the potential customers? What are they willing to pay? How big is the interest? The other thing is what is the interest people have in that? You want to build a credit that people will not only want and need, but they'll actually buy it, they can afford it. And so you want to find your, get you all your marketing materials in place and so you can wear yourself out on the rest of the checklist. But these are the basics that you want to get down. What is the product? What's the demand? Will people pay for it? How bad do they want it? And the other thing is, how are we going to market it? You know, we're going to market it with people. Am I going to market it with ads? I'm going to market it with website, driving people to a website. And then competition, how much competition are you going to have to deal with? Is it a new market that nobody is in there right now? What and what will make you stand out? What's your differentiation? What's your competitive edge? And then you start saying, how much activity will we have to have? I did all these studies like in a 30 days, in a month, how much activity would I need in a month? How many appointments will we need in a month? How many sales would that generate? What would the revenue off of those things? And if you have the opportunity to control your pricing, you want to get your pricing down as much as possible. But you got to be able to make a living too. It's great to have the cheapest product out there, but you've got to be able to afford to stay in business. So price and getting the cheapest price is not always the answer. So get a pricing strategy that'll work for you, work for the companies you deal with, but also work for the customer. And then you start projecting your revenue. And maybe in the beginning there's not a lot of revenue coming in, but pretty soon the revenue's gotta come. And so you run your projections. But don't wear yourself out with projections. You get a general idea on all of these things and, and then you find either it's making more and more sense to me or it's starting to become dubious, it was too questionable. But you want to have a plan, but you don't want to wear yourself out and kill yourself with planning because you can. There's things you don't need to know in year one that in year two you do need to know. But you're going to have resources, you're going to be further down the road to where now you have people in place, you have income, you have time to think about stuff and you have the context to where when the answers come, you can evaluate it and you can fit it in. A lot of these answers that people will hit you with case studies and these masters business programs. That's after the, you know, case studies are done, after they've already built the companies. Well, you're building something new and you're going to be on the fly, you're going to be on the run. And so you don't want to wear yourself out trying to figure out things that you don't need to worry about right now. Now down the road, as soon as possible, you're going to want to get start to get feedback, you're going to listen to people and you want to improve. So I don't want to wear you out with ideas to think about. We can do that later. We can expand on this if you like, just let me know. However, to wrap it up, validating a million dollar business idea does take careful research and testing and keeping an eye on the metrics. And you don't want to rush into expanding and over committing into this thing without understanding whether or not your idea can realistically generate the kind of revenue that you're interested in. You want to do it big, you want to make sure that your idea will allow you to do it big and give you the payoff. And that'll make it worthwhile for you to just throw everything you've got into it, because it's really hard to get ideas off the ground if you're piddling with it. No matter how you research it, you don't know if your idea is going to be good enough. You're going to be good enough to make it happen. But one thing you do know is you're not going to be good enough to do it, giving you the half hearted effort. So thanks for tuning in to the Million Dollar Mastermind Podcast today, and if this episode helped you get get clarity on your next steps, be sure to subscribe, share the episode and leave a review. Catch up with you next time. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind Podcast. Commit to your personal and professional evolution with our free training video. 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