TES 012 - Create An Elegant Solution & Stand Out

Hey there, real quick before we jump into the episode, listen, if your earnings treadmill hasn't set you free yet, running faster won't either. Listen, hustle without principles just going to burn you out. So here's what I want for you. I want you to join me for my money machine experience live. It is three free trainings. Deep dive into how to escape the treadmill and build a money machine that actually works for you. All right, grab your spot here by going to moneymachinelive.com and I'll see you in the free training. Hey there. I'm Mel Abraham, the author of the Entrepreneur's Solution and the founder of Business Breakthrough Academy, where we teach you how to design a business and create a life. And welcome back to this episode of the Entrepreneur's Solution show. We're going to continue in this episode on dealing. We just finished talking about the obstacles you may be challenged with as you start to build your business or you're in business and you're trying to launch a new product and some of those things. Now what I want to do is, is go into this, part two, if you will, of how do you create an elegant solution? So.

After we come back from this brief introduction, I want to talk about how do you create an elegant solution that connects and serves your marketplace?

Welcome to the Entrepreneur Solution, where highly successful entrepreneur Mel Abraham becomes your entrepreneurial mentor. Here, Mel reveals his business building strategies and even gets a chance to answer your questions. Mel Abraham, a CPA by education, but an entrepreneur by exhilaration and a true believer in the entrepreneurial way of life. It's through entrepreneurship that we create community, support society and live our dreams.

It's where possibility meets reality again and you can have the life and lifestyle you want. One of freedom and peace of mind. Welcome to this episode of the Entrepreneur's Solution where it's time for you to be bold, dream big and live life your way.

Hey there. Welcome back. I'm Mel Abraham, the author of the Entrepreneur Solution, the founder of Business Breakthrough Academy, where we teach you how to design a business and create a life, a life of financial freedom and peace of mind. And so welcome back to this episode. As I said, we're going to talk about how do you create an elegant solution for your customers, for your market, and how do you take what it is, your idea, your product, your services, and make it where it stands out from the perspective of how it's delivered. So let's dive right in and look at this. Well, you know, Mel, you're talking about this Thing, this elegant solution. What is an elegant solution? You know, it's the way I look at it is the simplest way to get the greatest impact. So whatever it is you're creating, whether it's to solve, you know, cleaning a floor or, you know, doing something that is, you know, rehabbing a back, whatever it is, what's the simplest way to move the needle, to have the greatest impact? That's where the elegance comes in when, when we look at an elegant solution. In order for it to truly be a solution and for it to be elegant, I think it needs to be enduring. In other words, it's not something that is sporadic or is time driven, that it's something that will withstand the time. It's not transient, if you will, as we go and into really, really be something that gets the attention in the marketplace. When someone hears you describe your solution or hears you describe your product, when you're pitching it to an angel funding group or you're putting together your Kickstarter video, or you're doing something from the stage and they talk about the solution, it's that moment where your market or your audience or your customers or your clients will go, aha. And that is when you know that you nailed it. So it's the aha solution in your market's eyes. When we look at it. So.

What is it tactically? How is it strategically? What do we need to think about? Well, from my perspective, I believe that an elegant solution will serve your market at three levels. And so the first level is dealing with the known and spoken problems that exist in the market. These are the things that are commonly known, commonly spoken about that. When all of the industry people get together, this is the buzz, this is what they're talking about, the, that they're struggling with. Whether it's it's getting customers or getting financing. That's it's common knowledge. It's really.

Clearly easily found information. But we still need to solve that problem. Even though everyone's talking about it, we need to come up with a solution for it. So level one. Level one is this known and spoken problem. It's the thing that everyone is chatting around the water cooler about. Then we go to level two. Level two is the known and unspoken problems. These are the things that are going on inside of their heads. This is the stuff that is keeping them up at night, but they're afraid to talk about it. This is the thing that if you mention it, they're going to look at you and say.

Are you eavesdropping on me? Are you in my mind. Are you reading my mind? They're going to feel like you're inside of them, but they're also going to feel like you're one of them because they're going to realize that you understand them. Now, this takes some work in the sense of research and study and analysis and communication and surveys to really start to get to the bottom of this. It's about understanding it in a way where you can deal with those known and unspoken problems. Now, many times the known and unspoken problems.

Revolve around self esteem, self effectiveness, self determination, all these things about good enough and the imposter syndrome that they're really afraid to come up with it. They may be even fear based in the context of, I don't want to expose myself that way. I don't want to look that vulnerable. But when you come to the marketplace and say to them, I understand, I empathize, I understand, I know what it's like. I've been there. And you speak not only of the problem, but you give them the solution. Now you're dealing with not only the level one problem of known and spoken that everyone knows, but you're dealing with the level two problem of known and unspoken. The thing that is keeping them up at night, that's driving them crazy, that's really.

Causing them to stir and stress and anxiety and suffer. In some cases, that gets them to really get their attention. Say, I think this person knows me. Remember, all of this is under the foundation of delivering on the customer promise. And if you can speak to level one and level two problems first, you can deliver on a customer promise at a far greater level. But what really starts to drive the cart faster is when you can speak to the level three problem, which is what we call the unknown unspoken problem. This is the thing that they don't even realize is coming down the tracks at them. This is the thing that they haven't even thought about. This is the element that when you talk about and say, let me tell you what's happening, let me give you a different perspective. Let me shed some light on where you are right now. And Len, let me give you a picture of where it's going.

If we don't get this solved, let me tell you what happens now. What that does is that you now look in their eyes. I mean, in their eyes, you look like.

This savior of sorts that says, wow, I'm glad I met you, because I would have never thought about that. And this is going to save me from that fiasco. So this level three problem is something that they are not even aware about. But what it allows you to do is elevate yourself to a level of expert, to a level beyond that, where you serve them on the three levels of level one, problems being known and spoken, the things that they know about that they're struggling with daily, and then the level 2, problems of known and unspoken, which they're afraid to talk about, that there isn't a dialogue, there isn't any communication about. But now you have come to them and said, I understand, I'm with you, and we can help. And then you elevate above that and shine the light on something they haven't even thought about, but you give them the solution for that. So when we talk about this concept of an elegant solution, remember, simplest with greatest impact. It's the aha solution. It's enduring, not transient. It serves the market on three levels. And then the last, I think, characteristic of your solution is that it needs to be easy to implement. It really is something that if it's too difficult to implement, if there's too much work involved, too much struggle involved, too much complexity involved, it's something that may be a great solution, but it's not going to get used because it's too difficult to implement. So that's what an elegant solution is. That's what we're striving for when we talk about creating products or services that serve a market need, that serve it at the highest level, that create distinction in the market space, in the marketplace. And when you get that right, you will work forward through this process now, so how do we come up with that? And one of the things that I want to kind of go through is this framework that. It's a framework that actually Toyota's used for a lot of years. And I think that it serves here it's this concept of idea loops, if you will. And idea stands for investigate, design, execute and Adjust. So it's this idea loop that you're constantly in to refine your products and services over and over and over again. And there's a set of questions and things that you go through. Now, all of this actually is in the downloadable guidebook that you can get from the links that I'm going to, that I give you. In fact, in this show, it's going to be. Melabraham.com 012 will get you to the page where you can get to the downloads. And if you're. Again, if you're on your phone and you're not at the computer, go ahead and text mylegacy my l, e g a c y my legacy one word, no spaces to 38470 and you can get the downloads for the guidebook that will help you through this process. But so what we want to talk about is this concept of idea loops to create the elegant solution. And again, idea stands for investigate, design. And investigate is really about questioning and surveying and studying and understanding. Then design is about the creation, the solution, the design of the solution, the product, the service, in a way that answers those three levels of problems, the unknown, all the way up to the unknown, unspoken problem, and from the known unspoken problem. And then execute is about going out and delivering, but that delivering from the context of getting feedback and testing. So it's about testing it so you can then refine it, which is the last part of the idea loop, which is adjust, which is, you know, reflecting on what has happened, what's transpired, what were the results, what was the feedback, and how we can then change it, shift it and do it all again. So we're constantly in this constant state of this idea loop to continue to refine it until we get to an elegant solution that's a deliverable, that's easy to implement, that really serves the audience. So let's just take a moment real quickly to go through each of the elements of the idea loop and talk about maybe the three major questions that you're going to answer here. The first part of the idea loop is the investigate, which is about, like I said, about questioning. Well, ask yourself this. What are you trying to do and why?

You know, what is it you're trying to solve? What you know, what problem, what issue, what challenge and why is it something that you're trying to solve? Is it something. Why is it that they're willing to pay for it? All of those, those elements come into play here. We want to investigate and ask all the questions to make sure that this is a viable solution. And not only viable, but a valuable solution to the marketplace. Because if it's not valuable, it's not going to be commercially viable. In other words, someone's not going to pay for it. And so we can come up with great solutions. But if no one's willing to pay for it, then it's not worth anything. And it's not, it's not something you're going to be able to build a business on. What are the facts and issues that surround not only the solution, but the problem? And make sure that you're looking at it from a bunch of different perspectives, a bunch of different Angles and say, what if, what if? What could this be? What else could this be? Keep asking the questions until you have a supreme command over the issues, the problems, the challenges and the desires and the needs of your customer. What's the problem and cause of it as you see it after you've done the investigation. So I think those are the three major questions in the investigate section of the idea loop. Then we go into the design part of this. This is where we're creating and solving the problem. So we're going to kind of design what it looks like. And I like to go from a, a zero based, kind of no budget perspective. So the first question is, what does the perfect solution look like putting complete limits around it?

Not putting any limits around it, I mean, not putting boundaries around it. What if you could solve it with no parameters on budget or time or anything? What does the perfect solution look like? And at least get a visual of that first and work from there to form your solution. Then ask yourself this next question of what ideas exist for achieving it. If that's the perfect solution, what exists now for possibly achieving that? You look at.

Zipcar. Zipcar was a solution for most of the rental cars historically in the United States have always been done by on a daily rate basis. And the founder of Zipcar, she saw when she was traveling Europe that they had the ability to rent their cars for.

An hour, two hours, three hours on an hourly basis versus a daily rate basis. And she brought that back to the United States thinking, all I got to do is I combine mobile, Internet and car rentals. So she didn't really create anything new. She just combined current capabilities and capacities in a different way way to achieve the results that she wanted to achieve. So what ideas exist for achieving it? And you want to look outside your industry and look at a lot of different things to see is there something similar that if we look at it and tweak it, we might be able to adapt it to the solution we're looking at. And then once we've gone through that, as you sit there, based on.

The current capabilities and the capacities that you have, the perfect solution, the constraints that might exist, what is the best solution that you see right now and design that and work from that. Because in the next phase when we go to execute, this is when we're going to turn around and test it. So now we're going to go back out to the market and say, all right, here's our solution. Now before you go out there, let's define what success is. Let's define what you expect to happen, which is really what the first question is. What would you expect to happen? What would you expect to see when you, when you do this? And, and then set up a control of how you want to test the solution. And which is the second question, how are you going to test the solution and then gauge and measure the scope of impact your solution has? What is the response? And, and you want the response to be transparent, honest, sincere and authentic. We don't want them to just, you know, blow smoke our way just because that's what we want to hear. If it's something that they love the solution, but they're not willing to pay for it, you're better off knowing about it up front then going and investing a lot of time into a product that they love, but they're not willing to pay for. And then once we've done this execute piece.

Now we can then reflect on all the data, all the information, all the information that came in and ask ourselves in this adjust phase, which is the last part of the idea loop before we start it over again, reflect on it and ask ourselves what did and didn't work and why, and pull and dissect those learnings out of it. Many times when a product doesn't work, people think it's failure. Well, you know, one of the greatest failures of our time became one of the greatest successes of our time post it notes was they were not trying to invent post it notes at the time when he was trying to invent post it notes, he was actually trying to invent a permanent adhesive and he failed miserably. But then they found another use for it. So what didn't work and why? Look at it as a feedback process to start to analyze and look at how else it can be used or what else needs to be done. So what adjustments can you make to it based upon the information? And then the last thing is, all right, what are the next steps? What do we need to do next? How do we need to take this the next to the next stage? What's the next step? Do we have the solution? Are we ready to go to market or do we need some more tweaking? Do we need to redesign it? You know, reinvestigate, redesign and re execute again, go through the idea loop again to see if it makes sense. And so really, that's the process of really trying to come up with your elegant idea or your elegant solution. Remember this concept of serving your market at a higher level, serving your market and solving problems at three levels. Level 1, 2 and 3. The known and spoken problem. The known and unspoken problem. The unknown and unspoken problem. Making sure that you've come up with something that is the simplest way to implement the solution but has the greatest impact. And make sure that it is enduring and not transient and simple to implement. And use the idea loop as the vehicle in which you start to develop these things. Because now you'll have a process in place that is going to force you through the process of trying to create something without just going out there flippantly and throwing things out there to see what sticks, but doing it with a strategy, with the tactics, with a process in place that's going to inform you all along the way. So when you do actually go out to market, you've got proof of concept, you've got data to support it, you've got study and information that will help support it. And now when we get into the next phase and start thinking about financing and building it, we have all this information available to us and we've created a product that is the elegant solution. So I hope this helps you start to understand how to bring elegance into your solutions, into your products, into your services, and into your business. Just the beginning, but I think it's a good start for you and I hope that you found this of value. And if you have and you haven't done it yet, make sure that you subscribe so you get the next episode or you constantly get notified of the episodes as they come out. And why not tell a friend, you know, let's share this with the community. I truly believe that entrepreneurship is the new paradigm of our future. It's not the industrial age anymore. There's so many people that are looking for a new way to take control of their life, build on possibility, build, create something that is of their dreams in their own control. And entrepreneurship is the path. And so I want to be your entrepreneurial mentor and help your friends along the way. So share it with your friends or share it with your family so we can serve them just the same. And again, if you want to get the guidebook that will take you through this process, downloadable guidebook, go to melabraham.com 0.

Or go ahead and text mylegacy one word to 38470 and until we get a chance to see each other again, may your vision be grand, your journey epic, and your legacy significant. See you soon.

We hope you enjoyed this episode. Make sure you subscribe so you get access to all of Mel's business and success tips. And if you like this episode, share it with a friend. If you have a specific business or success question, you can ask it at www.askmelnow.com. remember, it's all about being bold, dreaming big, and living life your way because the world needs you. Until the next episode, may your vision be grand, your journey epic, and your legacy significant.

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