MBA1407 Where to Start When You Have No Ideas + Free Ride Friday

Want to buy a car your way? Of course you do. That's why CarMax offers an experience designed just for you. Want to start online, then visit the lot, then go back online? Sure. Want to talk to a real person or chat online? Either works. Want to take your time and compare all the makes and models? No problem. Then make up some time by filling out the paperwork at home and schedule express pickup or home delivery. Done. When it comes to how you buy, CarMax puts you in the driver's seat. Want to drive CarMax delivery restrictions apply. See CarMax.com for details.

Ready to save on new tech? It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Perks include Dell Rewards, free shipping, premium support, and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals.

Hey, today is Free Ride Friday so make sure you hang on to the end of the episode to hear who won this week's free ride. Every Friday we give away a lifetime membership to one of our courses. We're giving away easy course, our 30 day course on how to build your own online course. It retails for $500 over at EasyCourse Co, but somebody's going to win it for free today. You can win it for free as well. Just leave us an iTunes rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. Just listen in on Friday to see if you won't. That simple. It's our way to say thanks for showing us love on itunes. Alright, let's jump into today's episode. Hey O. Welcome to the $100 MBA show, the business podcast you know you deserve every day 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 $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online. And in today's lesson you will learn where to start when you have no ideas. Many people want to start a business. They want to be their own boss. They want financial independence, but they don't necessarily have an idea. They don't have a business idea they want to implement. They might have a few interests or hobbies or some things they kind of thought about, but nothing really concrete that they've nailed down. They want to actually move towards their goal and but where do you start when you don't really have an idea or a topic to Start the business. You don't have a business model, you don't have a product. Heck, you don't even know what you're going to be selling. So in today's episode, I'm going to show you where to start. Many people think that a business is an idea that's implemented, that the nucleus and the power of a business is in its idea. No, this is an absolute myth. Successful businesses serve an audience by helping them solve their problems, ease their pain, make their life easier in the way they implement their solution. Look at when you used your credit card, you spent your money in the last week, okay? These are all businesses, these are all places that are taking your money. All right? Most of them are not that innovative. There's nothing really special about the grocery store. It's been around forever. There's nothing special about that online shop. You bought those shoes. The thing particularly mind blowing or innovative about that gym membership, you just paid. These are all businesses that make money, earn a living and earn your business mainly because they're giving you great value or at least good value for your dollar. They're serving your needs in some way. So in today's episode, I'm going to show you where to start to start cultivating some ideas so you can have some direction, how to cultivate a following so you can have people to sell to. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. You want to be an entrepreneur, you want to start a business. Not really sure where to get started. This is where you start. First of all, I want to say that you don't want to rush into an idea, you don't want to rush into a business, a concept, a business model just because you want to start something. I'm a big believer in learning and experiencing and failing fast. But there are ways to do that without costing you your life savings. Now if you just want to get started, so to get some ideas, to understand what, where you want to go with this business stuff, my number one recommendation is to start a blog. A blog, Omar? Really? Isn't that like 2012 or something? No, blogging is still very strong. It's still the number one way to be found on Google. And this is not your business. The whole point of this exercise is to discover what you want to start. And the best way to discover that is, is to organize your ideas to voice them. Now I say voice them, but really what I mean is document them. When you have an idea, when you have some thoughts, when you have opinions on anything, even if you're reviewing the latest laptop you just bought. Writing down your ideas totally changes the process of your evaluation of your thoughts, of your opinion than just blurting them out with your mouth. Why? Because when you have to craft a blog post, you have to kind of take some time to think about what you're going to say, how you're going to say it, craft the best way to convey it. You're going to write it down, you're going to type it out, you're going to read it back to yourself. You're going to ask yourself, do I really believe this? Is this something that I should do by publishing this post? Is this really what I'm trying to say? Maybe there's a better way to say it. Your ideas will be fully formed. You allow your self to analyze your ideas and cultivate them and nurture them, and then present them to the world. This is why blogging is so powerful and has been so helpful for me personally as I went through my entrepreneurial journey. This, again, this is not your business right now. This is so you can form your identity as an entrepreneur, so you can start to understand what you want to get into. And blogging is an easy way to do that. You can just start a blog easily with any of the website building services out there, whether it's Weebly or Squarespace or you start up a WordPress site and just by giving yourself the task to write one blog post a week. This is not a huge time requirement. This is a couple hours a week at most when you're getting started. It trains you to be disciplined. It trains you to take this seriously. If you can't write one blog post a week, I'm not really sure you're ready to start a business. It's going to take a lot more discipline and effort to do that. And yes, you may not like writing, but writing and communicating is going to be your only tools to take on the world with your business. You need to be able to communicate properly in both verbal and written form to communicate your ideas on your sales page, to communicate ideas to your, your team, to your employees, in interviews, when you're interviewing people for your company, right? When communicating ideas on stage, at conferences, at meetups. You have to be a great communicator to be a successful entrepreneur, and at the very minimum, a really good written communicator. You may not be a fantastic showman on stage, but you need to at least be able to communicate, you know, in written form. Because the amount of emails you're going to be sending, the amount of communication you're going to be making via text is incredible as an entrepreneur, and you need to hone in that skill now. So this is a good test to see if this is something you want to do. And I believe a good test for a career path, a life path, is not test if you like something, it's if you can put up with the things that you have to do that you may not like in the long run. Every job, every profession, every single thing you do in life, whether you're a professional athlete, an entrepreneur, a firefighter, a chef, there are aspects of that career you're not going to like. And I believe the best way to know if you're able to actually pull that off and persevere is to be able to do the things that you don't like consistently and be okay with it, to be able to put up with it. Now, by blogging every day, you're getting a chance to allow yourself to think and not allow ideas just to sit in your head. This is the problem with a lot of people that are getting started in business. They have a whole bunch of ideas in their head. They're swimming in their head. They don't get a chance to really analyze the ideas, jot them down, document them, maybe publish a blog post about them. And these could be business ideas. They could be ideas about the world, about the world of health or fitness or their personal life or their pets or whatever it is. It could just be a personal blog and a way for you to express these ideas. It gets them out of your head and into the world, and you start to realize, do these ideas really matter? Do they resonate with other people? Maybe they're not as big as I thought they were in my head or a big of a deal. And this allows you to analyze this. Now, by pumping out all these blog posts and ideas in the world, you're going to start to see what resonates with certain people, what people comment on, what people like, what people share on social media, and also what you start to like, what you find that you can add the most value in your area of expertise, your area of, you know, quote, unquote genius. Where can you add the most value in the world? Given your experiences and your personality and who you are, you're gonna find that out week after week blogging, and it may take six months, a year, two years. I believe in order to have the full experience, you need to at least publish 50 blog posts. And I actually borrowed this idea from one of my friends and mentors, Corbett Barr over at Fizzle Corbett told me when I first got started blogging, because he blogged before me. Publish 50 blog posts and then come talk to me. Tell me if your blog is getting traction or if you like it or not, or if this experiment didn't work. And indeed, after publishing actually 52 once a week for a full year, I realized, wow, this is super helpful. And it's not only helped me define who I am and what I think, but also I'm able to now have an audience. People listen to what I write and read what I write and listen to what I say on a podcast or an interview, if I'm being interviewed. The point here is that you start cultivating an audience. Now, this audience is like gold. If you don't have anybody to talk to, you have nobody to sell to. So down the line, this audience is going to be interested in what you have to offer, not because of only the product, but also because they're interested in you. They've gravitated towards you and who you are. I've bought several things just basically because I love the person who's behind it. I like what they stand for, I want to support them, and, hey, they just create cool things. So you're starting that situation. You're building that audience, and this is where you start. You start with a blog, you start with cultivating your ideas, you start sharing these ideas, you start building your audience. You start understanding what kind of entrepreneur you want to be, what kind of business you're interested in, what kind of topics you're interested in, what kind of niche you want to get into. You're not going to know by just letting these things simmer in your head. You got to get them out of your head. You got to get these ideas out there, and you got to start analyzing what happens is. When I started writing about some things I thought I would love to start a business on, I realized I really don't love it that much. And honestly, there's no money in it. I don't want to struggle. I'd rather build a business that generates wealth and generates an income that I like than starting a business that I love that has me struggling financially. That was my experience. You could have a different experience, but you're not going to know unless you try and start blogging.

Is it time to reimagine your future? The right business skills may make a difference in your career. At Capella University, we offer a relevant education that's designed to focus on what you need to know in the business world. We'll teach professional skills to help you pursue your goals, like business management, strategic planning, and effective communication, and you can apply these skills right away. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at Capella. Edu.

Blogging is a great way to cultivate your ideas and figure out where you want to go next. It also allows you to build an audience that will be willing to buy what you offer down the line. Get this habit going if you want to get started, publish every week, get a year under your belt and report your results to me. Let me know. Email me omar@100mba.net let's carry this tradition that Corbett did with me. Thanks so much for listening. Today's episode's not over though. It's Free Ride Friday. Let's see who won this week's Free Ride. And the winner is SK508. That's the handle SK508 says. Great show. Five stars. This is my new favorite podcast. I learn something new every episode and I actually listen to every episode as it comes out. Thank you SK508 for that awesome review. Your mission is to email me over@omarrba.net, so I can hook you up with the lifetime membership to Easy if you want to win access to easy course, our $500 course on how to build your own online course over at easycourse co. Just leave us an iTunes rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw we call Free Ride Friday. This is what it is right here. Just listen in on Friday to see if you won. It's that simple. It's our way to say thank you for leaving us love on itunes. Before I go, I want to leave you with this if you're currently in a career and a job and you're thinking about starting a business, this exercise I just described blogging every week. This is something you can definitely do while you're in a job. You can definitely carve out two hours during the weekend or during the week at night and get this ball rolling. Don't wait. This is totally doable and it'll make you feel like you're taking steps towards your future and your business. Thank you so much and I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

At Capella University, learning the right skills could make a difference. That's why our business programs teach you relevant skills you can take from the course room to the workplace. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at Capella Eduardo.