At Kona Impact we meet a lot of entrepreneurs. We also see several “want-a-prenuers”, people who are always thinking about starting a business, but for some reason fail to get anything going. These are the people who have a lot of ideas, so many, in fact, that they will often come to Kona Impact and try to talk through their ideas and fish for advice.
The want-a-prenuers all have something in common: they are watching the business world from the bleachers or the sidelines: they are not in the game. They are spectators stuck in the world of “could,” “might,” and “thinking about”.
The entrepreneurs are in the game. They have a product or a service and are doing business, sometimes very little business and sometimes a lot of business.
The value of being in the game is immense. You will learn:
- Is your product or service wanted in the marketplace?
- How much you can charge for your product or service?
- What are your expenses and costs?
- How much does it cost to acquire a customer?
- Is your business viable?
You will never learn the answers to these questions from the sidelines. You can guess, but our experience at Kona Impact with working with hundreds of entrepreneurs is that your guesses are likely to be wildly inaccurate, so much so, that they probably are only a good first-day estimate and will be thrown out after a few weeks or months of being in business.
The want-a-prenuers have ideas….lots of them. The entrepreneurs have experience, loads of data from the process of being in business, and a lot of customer feedback.
We know there is nothing more humbling that reality. That said, there is nothing more valuable than knowing if you are wasting your time (i.e., your business is not viable), you can make it with changes (95% of viable start-up businesses we know) or if you have a runaway business that will bring your huge profits and little competition right away (maybe 5% of business, probably less).
How can you go from want-a-prenuer to entrepreneur? Easy! Go from idea to product. If you are a service business, start pitching potential customers. Go all in. If you treat your business like a pastime or a hobby, expect very little financial gain from it.
At Kona Impact we work with hundreds of businesses a year, including some of the largest employers on the island and many small mom and pop businesses. Let us help you!