The Plague Of Poor Executions: My Insight To Why Most Entrepreneurs And Businesses Fail
In my own words, I believe the business journey is divided into three basic pit-stops which I call I.C.E to mean “Ideation, Conceptualization and Execution. Ideation implies the generation and development of ideas. Conceptualization involves the development of models and strategies that shapes the ideas we have including team formation and dynamics while execution takes into consideration the activities that gets the job done. This also follows an ascending order of importance and value so execution will, in this case, be the most valuable in my rating.
You may want to ask why and this is my answer.
As an entrepreneur, I believe in the power of ideas and their impact on the formation and survival of businesses. No doubt, ideas are the fundamental ingredients in any business. You can’t have a business without one. More likely than not, you need to have an idea of possible users, their wants and needs and the problem you are trying to solve as a business before anything else. Without an idea, nothing else happens.
You certainly might also need to develop workable and feasible business concepts and models to deploy these ideas. Ideas on their own do not stand alone and rely on the development of models and strategies for proper execution. This is quite a great thing and amplifies the fact that conceptualization has a great level of impacts. After all, what would you do without a strategy? It’s the plan that makes the idea work.
But after many years as an entrepreneur, I have seen many entrepreneurs fall into the idea-means-all trap. By having an idea, most entrepreneurs assume that they’ve had it all and fall into the make-believe where they assume that the lines are going to fall in perfectly and their ideas would be the best that’s ever happened. The world has never seen anything yet.
Sad enough, what we see happening every day are business ideas that never survive the first punch; ideas that never make it through the darkest hours. A lot of dot coms that become dot gone. Most ideas never survive the first punch when they eventually make it out of our heads, unto a paper and into the real world. That’s if they even make it out of our heads because most people sleep and dream of beautiful ideas at night and are inspired to change the world with it but in the morning reality sets in and they don’t even realize when they push their great ideas side.
Most people also incorrectly assume that all you need for business success is a great business plan and model. The vast majority of entrepreneurs believe in the potency of a business plan or business canvas that lays out all its concepts and strategies for growth and expansion to deliver on their promises. Either way, none is farther from the truth. However, from my point of view, execution plays a much more role in determining the success of any business venture. difference between successful businesses and failed ones to a large extent is mostly execution.
In the light of these, allow me to present to you why I believe more clearly in executions
Execute poorly and the idea doesn’t matter
Steve Jobs remarked, “To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed … Execution is worth millions.” I totally agree. I am of the opinion that execution makes the difference in the success rate of businesses and that most ideas that showed up in the world would have been successful if they were properly executed.
The glory of every idea is in its execution. If executed rightly, the chances of success is most likely and the rest is history. If not, then all the time, effort and resources that have been put together into the process of idea generation becomes a ruin. A total waste. Yes, we learn from it most of the times, but the opportunity cost of wrong executions outweighs the benefits of the lessons learnt if learnt at all. Some entrepreneurs are never able to recover from the pains of huge losses. In these cases, the lessons learnt doesn’t even mean much.
Research and experiences have shown that more often than not, ideas are a dime. Ideas although very important are the easiest components of the business and the most glorified. You can see entrepreneurs clinging to their ideas like a fat kid will do cheese. And when they eventually decide to work on these ideas, it is a total disaster.
Execute poorly and the model doesn’t matter
Let’s imagine you have a great idea and have been able to develop formidable concepts and models around the idea through market and user research. You’ve been able to get funding from investors by a mouth-watering pitch presentation. What can stop you from success? The answer isn’t farfetched from poor executions. One of my college professors used to say, “To achieve business success, you need to execute efficiently. The idea generated and the time invested in formulating a business plan and model matters less if you go out there and do everything wrongly. Your ideas and everything else is garbage without right executions. Get it wrong with executions and you ruin the possibilities of a million-dollar idea springing up bountiful harvest at the end of the day.
It’ll come as no surprise to most entrepreneurs that many ideas fail. Statistics prove that 9 out of 10 ideas will fail ultimately. Venture capitalists believe that in a portfolio of companies, there will always be one dominant idea outperforming and the rest. This has been the motivation for their recent investments in teams more than in ideas. If they find the team valuable enough to deliver on its goals and objectives, they will invest more than they will in an idea with no tendencies of proper execution owing to poor team dynamics.
With a great idea in place and a model that has been discovered to fit in the business narrative, if the execution is done right, then everything else works all conditions been equal. This trickles down to more customer acquisition, increased revenue generation and high levels of business performance. This is the hope of every business enterprise. And in the aggregate, I am hoping for more businesses escaping the plague of poor executions that I have greatly witnessed, and hitting the optimal marks of productivity.
