MBA1115 Q&A Wednesday: I have too many ideas for my business. How do I implement them all?

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Hey O welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show answers to your important business questions with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online and today's episode is a Q and A Wednesday episode. On our Q and A Wednesday episodes I answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you have a question you want to ask, just email me over at Omar MBA Net. I would love to answer your question right here on the show. Today's question is from Karen and Karen asks, I have too many ideas for my business. How do I implement them all? Solid question Karen. That's the hallmark, that's the common trait in a lot of entrepreneurs is that you have a ton of ideas that go into your head day in and day out. That's a good thing. But your question is like how do I actually make them happen? Implement them all. Often this will cause the feeling of overwhelm because you just don't know where to start. You don't know what to do. You don't know if you should accomplish them all, how to do them all. What's a system that you can take on? What's a plan of attack that you can actually adopt. That's what I'm going to share with you in today's episode. What to do with all these ideas and how to make sure you have a plan of action to implement them, or maybe not implement them. Let's find out. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. In today's Q and A Wednesday episode, Karen asks, I have too many ideas for my business. How do I implement them all? Okay, so first thing we have to do is that we have to accept the fact that we just can't implement them all at once. I could tell you right now 25 ideas that have been in my head for the past month that I want to do in my business, but it's just impractical to think I can do them all right now. Today I have other things to do. I have things to keep the business running. I have to manage my team. So what do I do? Just give up on all of them? No, but the first step is coming to terms with the fact that it's okay to have a lot of ideas that don't get implemented instantly. At the same time, we also have to keep in mind it's not okay to not try any new ideas at all. Just to have them in your head and never try them. Now, having said all that, we have to have a system in place to implement these ideas, to actually move forward with some of them. Now, the point of this system is so we get these ideas out of our head in. Into some sort of format. Now why are we doing this? Well, one, we don't want to forget these idea. Two, we want to actually, you know, have a second thought about this idea and maybe shape the understanding of what they are. And then also we want to evaluate which ideas are worth pursuing. Not all ideas are created equal. And I'll explain what I mean in a moment. So the first thing we're gonna do is that we're gonna create a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet that we can have access to anytime, anywhere. And I like Google Sheets because you can have a Google Sheets app right on your phone. And I just call this General idea Dump. And it's basically a sheet that I dump all my ideas on. In this sheet, I have two tabs. The first tab is called Ordered, and the next tab is called Dump. Basically, the Dump tab is I just dump the idea that I get in my head earlier. I don't worry about what order I put it in. I don't even worry about spelling. I just type as fast as I can into the Dump tab, and usually I have that tab as default. Open first. Now, once a week, I'm gonna look at all my ideas in the Dump tab, and I'm going to transfer them over to the Order tab. This is a tab that has them in some sort of order. Now, in this tab, there's three columns. And I love this system because it makes things so much easier. The first column is the name of the idea, or whatever the idea is. Let's say, create a ROI calculator on the pricing page. This is an idea, an actual idea that I have in my head that I've implemented recently. So that's the first column, the actual idea. The next column is titled Impact, and I'm going to give it a score from 1 to 5. How much impact will this idea have on the growth of my business, on my business in general? One being not so much and five being it's going to make a tremendous impact. So I'm not really sure this is going to make a tremendous impact, but at the same time, I think it's going to be really helpful. I'm going to give it a 3, and I can use decimal points if I want, 2.5 if I want to. The next column is titled Speed, and this is going to give it a score from one to five. How fast can I implement this idea? A five would be one day. That means it's very fast. I can implement this really quickly in one day. So I'd give it a five score. The top score one would be like a few months, and you can guess where everything else kind of lays into place. Three would be like a few weeks, that type of thing. Now, next to the Speed column, I have a total score. And basically what I do is I create a formula that adds up the score they got for Impact and Speed. So ideas that get a 10 have 5 on both columns. They're going to be something I want to implement as soon as possible because. Because it's quick, it's easy, and it's gonna make the biggest impact. Now, when this is all fleshed out, usually I'll have like a list of 20 or so ideas. And then what I do is I just filter for top score. Now, just a quick note. When I move the item, the idea, from the Idea Dump tab to the order tab or sheet, I basically cross it out, I strike through it. So I make sure that I don't look at that anymore. I've already evaluated it. Now, once I've ordered all my ideas by top score, I Usually cancel out. I completely strike through any ideas that score a 2 or less. That means they got a 1 on both the speed as well as the impact. It's just not worth my time and effort to work on those ideas. They're just not really effective ideas. It's making some sort of impact, but it's minimal impact. That's taking a lot of effort and time. Now, what I love about the system is that it tells me what to work on. It just keeps me laser focused. The numbers don't lie. They tell you exactly which ideas to pursue first. Obviously the ones that are 10 and closest to 10. Now, full disclosure, this system I didn't pick up myself is actually a hybrid, a metamorphosis of a system that Noah Kagan shared with me once. Noah Kagan is The founder of Sumo.com, good friend of mine, awesome guy. And I love this system because it removes the emotion, it removes the ambiguity, and it allows you to manage yourself. It allows yourself to tell yourself, hey, work on this. This is what's gonna make a difference, and this is what you can do quickly. Okay? Now that you have a system, that's just the beginning. You have to remember that ideas are dime a dozen. I say this all the time. They do not have any value without implementation. Implementation's really what it's all about. How are you gonna implement these ideas? How are you actually gonna put. So if you want to take the sheet further, have a third tab called implementation where you put the idea and you write down what's the first step to take with this idea. So let me give you the example of the ROI calculator that I worked on recently. Now, an ROI calculator is basically what it sounds like, a return on investment calculator. I wanted to create some sort of interface on the pricing page of a new product that we're releasing about that soon. And basically the visitor on the website can plug in their own numbers, how many visitors they get on their website, what's their average conversion rate, what's the price of their product, and what's their conversion rate on sales. We give some suggested numbers as an example, but once they plug in their numbers, it will give them an estimate of how much money they can make with this product. Obviously it's just a suggestion, but it gives them a rough idea. Now, this is sort of sophisticated, like, how am I going to create this, you know, sort of app, this functionality on the website, even if I have a developer work on it, I need to understand the idea fully and have Some sort of working example. So that's where I start. What's a minimal, viable example of that? Well, forget about the website for a second, because that kind of complicates matter, but let me just create this calculator in some way, some fashion. So the first thing I did is I created this calculator in an Excel sheet just with some simple formulas. It took me five minutes to do it, and then I presented it to my designer. I said, hey, this is what I'm looking to do. So she mocked up some designs. We took the design and then the Excel sheet, and the next step, we took it to a developer, our developer that's working on the project. Hey, this is what we want to do. Can you implement this design? Can you implement the actual program that will calculate the roi? And then once she had a crack at it, we gave some feedback. No, actually, it's supposed to do this. Once that was done, we added the information, the instructions that we had to give the visitor to, so they know what to put in each field. So it's not confusing. So you get the point. You want to put in this sheet the first step you have to take to start implementing this idea. And then once you get that first step, I like to add the second and third step. Then after I finish this, what's the next step? What's the next step? I like three steps because I feel like if I get to step three, I see the finish line and it's possible, and it gets me really close to accomplishing this task, this idea.

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All right, to wrap up today's Q and A Wednesday's question, Karen's got a ton of ideas for her business. She doesn't know how to implement them all. Get organized and let the data tell you what to do. Again, create a spreadsheet where you have two sheets or two tabs. One is just a pure dump of ideas that you can just put ideas in at any time when they come to you. And the next is an organize order tab where they're all organized. Where we have three or we should say four columns. The first column is the idea. The second column is the impact score. One out of five, how much impact? Five being a huge amount of impact, one being not so much. The third column is time. How fast can you implement this idea? Five being a day really quickly and one being a few months. And then the fourth column is a total score. And then order your ideas by total score, with 10 being the highest. Attack those first and then list what are the first three steps to implement that idea. Thank you, Karen, for that awesome question. I hope that helped you and helped others who are listening to today's episode. Every Wednesday we answer your questions, so make sure you email me if you have a question you want to ask over at Omar100- MBA net. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. I know some of you kind of said spreadsheets. Oh, no, I used to be like that until I realized, wow, spreadsheets are your friend. They make things easier. It lets you be totally objective. And they're a really fast way to jot ideas down, especially with our phones now. So embrace those spreadsheets. They'll allow you to have a better business that you enjoy. Okay, I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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