This week business owners talk about how they came up with their various business ideas, and the path they've taken to turn their ideas into reality.
Every business starts with an idea. For entrepreneur Roger Boyd, the genesis of the idea behind his business, 1Above, occurred in mid-air.
"I was on a flight from Miami to LA in 2001 when a guy passed away," he explains. "The doctor who worked on him happened to sit beside me and proceeded to tell me about all the issues of flying dehydrated and nutritionally depleted. I was like most people I knew - burning the candle at both ends - and the event really made me start to think about how I fly."
Boyd began further investigating how to better cope with the effects of flying a couple of years after that experience, when he took on a job that required him to fly two out of every four weeks but "it wasn't until 2007 that I worked up the gumption to quit corporate life and go and take a chance on an idea I had six years earlier", he says.
Today Boyd's 1Above flight drink, which is targeted at fighting the impact of jet lag and supporting circulation, is available in nine airports across Australia and New Zealand and the company is now focusing on entering the US market.
This week I've interviewed a small group of business owners about how they came up with their various business ideas, and the path they've taken to turn their ideas into reality.
Boyd's biggest learning about the process of bringing a business idea to life is it takes "cast iron perseverance".
It's a sentiment echoed by Ken Erskine, who's seen countless startup entrepreneurs and ideas over the years as the director of startup and ICE Angels at business growth hub The Icehouse.
"An idea on its own is never enough," says Erskine. "Very rarely does anyone have a unique idea that no one has had before, so part of the challenge is doing something with it in an appropriate manner. As an entrepreneur it's really about keeping that balance between dogged determination and resilience, and knowing when to say 'I'm not getting enough traction, let's move on to the next idea'."
The mad inventor-style ideas - the random ones that just pop into someone's head in the middle of the night - are generally the ones that are really hard to commercialise without that previous understanding of how the existing market behaves and operates.
Also key to successfully turning an idea into a business, he says, is first finding out whether there's a real market for it. That's why the successful ideas Erksine has observed are often inspired by insights people have gained from working in or around an industry or market.
"The mad inventor-style ideas - the random ones that just pop into someone's head in the middle of the night - are generally the ones that are really hard to commercialise without that previous understanding of how the existing market behaves and operates," he says. "When asking people to adopt any new idea you're asking them to change their current behaviour, and getting them to do that comes down to how compelling a proposition you have to meet their unmet need or want."
Telling the story behind how a company came up with an idea can be an important means of communicating between a founder and potential partners or customers, says Erskine; people, after all, love a good story.
Such has been the case for Mark Major, the founder of crowdsourced game development startup GameStarter.
The company was started in November last year with the development of its first product, Plummet Free Fall - a game based on Major's real-life experience seven years ago of falling down a hole while in Beijing and breaking his back.
According to Major, telling the story of his accident and how it inspired his business idea has played a huge role so far in building the company.
"All my pitches to potential investors start with the story," he says. "I can't even shave off my beard because it's now part of the brand, given that the 'game me' in Plummet has a ginger beard."
The business owners interviewed this week generally described the development of their new ideas as less about having a definitive 'eureka' moment, and more as an iterative process.
Carolyn Lotawa is an occupational therapist whose business, Everyday OT, works with children individually and through group programmes, including Everyday Skate - a programme that uses skateboards as a therapeutic tool.
Lotawa had been using skateboards in her occupational therapy work for years, initially informally and later introducing them into individual therapy sessions when she saw children at their schools. Everyday Skate evolved out of a series of further steps, including incorporating a skateboarding session into a holiday programme, researching best practice, launching a programme using contracted skate coaches and equipment, and then last year bringing the programme inhouse.
Lotawa says her biggest learning about turning an idea into reality as a business owner is that you have to believe in your idea.
"One of my mentors from the UK said to me that the programme will always exist if you keep running it. If you stop, it's gone and basically so is the momentum you were creating," she says. "So I surround myself with good people and work really hard to share my vision and make a difference."
Roger Boyd, 1Above
Roger Boyd is the founder of 1Above, a flight drink targeted at fighting the impact of jet lag and supporting circulation. 1Above began selling four years ago and is now in nine airports across Australia and New Zealand.
How did you come up with the idea for 1Above?
I was on a flight from Miami to LA in 2001 when a guy passed away. The doctor who worked on him happened to sit beside me and proceeded to tell me about all the issues of flying dehydrated and nutritionally depleted. I was like most people I knew - burning the candle at both ends - and the event really made me start to think about how I fly.
A couple of years later I had a global category role where I flew two weeks out of every four and that really made me try to find ways to cope, so I began investigating more and more. It wasn't until 2007 that I worked up the gumption to quit corporate life and go and take a chance on an idea I had six years earlier.
What role has that story played in helping you grow and develop your business?
I think it's engaged the team. Given the importance of hydration when we fly I think it's crazy how many people treat it so lightly. It's drier than the Sahara on a plane yet most people get on a flight, drink alcohol, dehydrate themselves by consuming diuretics like coffee and soft drinks or hardly drink any liquids at all and then get off the other end wondering why they're feeling so bad - or blaming jet lag.
And a definitive study on over 8,000 passengers has shown you're between three and nine times as likely to get deep vein thrombosis on a plane as on the ground. I think - and hope - the team are all engaged around making life better for travellers and perhaps making a difference to someone getting off the other end of a flight one day. It's why I'm doing it.
What steps did you take to make your idea come to life, and what have been the primary challenges along the way?
I'd worked around the world for Fonterra for 12 years so had a bit of savings, and I developed the idea from scratch to where it was market ready. We took on investment just before we got our first contract and the investment was subject to receiving that contract.
I think the key challenge for me has just been taking on too much. At one stage I was doing on my own what a team of nine is now doing. At some stage in a company's growth that's not going to work anymore and I found that out by dropping the ball on a few things, which wasn't fun. Unfortunately most of us find that out the hard way.
So if I could advise new entrepreneurs anything it would be to get help before that happens, although sometimes circumstances - your cash position and so on - prevent that. It can be a challenge to get the support in, and most entrepreneurs are very self-reliant so sometimes will only ever change by finding out the hard way.
What's been your biggest learning about what it takes to turn an idea into reality that you'd like to share with aspiring entrepreneurs?
You need cast iron perseverance. There's a way to do anything and you will find the people who will help you do what you want if you're relentless. We take the phone for granted, but you can talk to someone on the other side of the world - a 24-hour flight away - and they say 'hi' back within a second. That sort of stuff blows me away.
What it takes to become Graham Alexander Bell is perseverance; it takes perseverance to do anything. When someone says it can't be done I don't really listen to them - perhaps to a fault - because the things we're trying to do fail miserably in comparison to what has been done by others already.
So it's not a learning I guess, but it's a quality you have to have as an entrepreneur or you won't get there. It's also a quality you somehow have find a way to embed in the team you have around you.
Coming up in Your Business: Etsy is a massive global marketplace to buy and sell all things homemade. So what are some of the great Kiwi businesses making a living out of selling on this platform? If you've got a story to tell on growing a small business through Etsy, drop me a note: nzhsmallbusiness@gmail.com
