Continuation from yesterday……..In the late 1980’s Steve Ells started at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York. Shortly after graduating he moved to San Francisco to work as a line cook for Jeremiah Tower. It is there that he saw how popular Mexican food was on the West Coast. In 1993, taking what he learned in San Francisco Steve had a big idea. He opened up his first Chipotle restaurant in Denver, Colorado in a former Dolly Madison Ice Cream Store near the University of Denver with an $85,000 loan from his father. At the time Ells calculated that the store would need to sell approximately 107 burritos per day to be profitable. By the end of the first month and to everyone’s surprise, the store was selling approximately 1,000 burritos a day. The second restaurant was opened in 1995 and the rest, as they say, is history. Today, Chipotle is a public company with 1,600 stores, $3.6 Billion in sales and a $21 Billion market capitalization. With Steve Ells’s estimated net worth of well over $200 Million.
Not a bad idea if you ask me. Yet, the story above flies in the face of where many people believe big ideas come from. Most people have a false impression of waking up with big idea or being randomly hit with a flash of brilliance that would eventually lead them toward their big breakthrough. An easy to execute business idea that would bring millions or billions within a relatively short span of time and without too much effort on their part. Unfortunately, it rarely works that way. What’s worst, many believe that such brilliant ideas are reserved for a few lucky ones, the creative types or those destined to be rich.
Luckily for you, such a perception couldn’t be further from the truth.
Like anything else in life, successful idea creation is a process that can be learned, replicated and improved upon. Just as bodybuilders build their muscles by constantly working out, one exercise and one workout at time, we must work on our idea generation muscle on a daily basis. The formula is fairly easy and straight forward. The more we work on our idea generation capability on the daily basis, the more ideas we will come up with. More importantly, the ideas we will generate after a certain amount of time will be exponentially better than the ones that we start with. And that can make all the difference between coming up with a $100,000 a year business and coming up with a $100 Million a year business.
It is also important to pause here one last time and to remind you that coming up with a great business idea is not enough. Coming up with a great business idea in the field that you are passionate about is the key. Remember, it is a 100% certainty that you will run into numerous problems as you begin to grow your business. Some of them will appear insurmountable. The only thing that will get you through the rough times is your love and absolute passion for what you do. Nothing else will. And believe me, this tiny factor makes all the difference between success and failure.
Take the story of Dyson’s founder Sir James Dyson. Prior to his first vacuum cleaner hitting the store shelves in 1993, he spent 15 years creating 5,126 failed versions of his vacuum cleaner before he made the one that worked. Do you really believe he would have been able to preserver though 5,126 failures if he didn’t love vacuum cleaners or if he wasn’t passionate about inventing? That would be a foolish proposition. The payoff? A multi-billion dollar company known for its breakthrough technology and innovative designs.
To Be Continued Tomorrow…….(Why Am I Seeing This On A Financial Website?)
What You Ought To Know About Coming Up With Billion Dollar Ideas Google