Once you have created a clear vision of your Ideal Average Day, your goal should be to create a business that fits to the lifestyle that you want, rather than diving into any business and finding you’ve created a life that you hate. Having set clear goals in light of your Ideal Average Day, you will be well positioned to narrow down business opportunities to those that align with how you want to live. To simplify this process you should create what I (and others) refer to as a Validation Checklist.
This checklist is simply a quality assurance process to ensure that you get the results that you want. It should cover criteria for both:
- a viable business
- a business in line with your Ideal Average Day
Why you need a Validation Checklist
The main reason is obviously prioritisation.
You have limited time and resources. Having a checklist keeps you jumping from idea to idea saving you both time and resources. It does this by both invalidating ideas and showing you, you already have something worth working on if you’ve already got started. You will be able to quickly cast “good ideas” aside because you will quickly identify that they don’t fit with your Ideal Average Day.
What should be in your Validation Checklist
Your Validation Checklist needs to be a series of questions that you can quickly answer “Yes” or “No” to. In reality, this is not always possible – you may have to do some research which could take some time and in other cases you will be better off having a scoring system. Either way, you want to be able to run ideas through a checklist and be able to see if the idea is compatible with what you are trying to achieve.
I don’t know what is in your Ideal Average Day, so it is going to be hard for me to tell you what to add specifically but, you need to look at the practical elements of running the business. For example, my Ideal Average Day has travelling at a moment’s notice as a high priority. This means having a company that needs me to be somewhere specific won’t work. So, I have “can run the business from a laptop” as one of my criteria.
I encourage you to spend a few days looking into businesses you think are exciting or interesting and see if you think they would fit with your ideal average day. Ask yourself why they do or, do not, then start building your criteria. I typically suggest having a minimum of 10 things and they should cover:
- How much you are willing to invest to get setup
- Which type of clients / customers do you want to work with
- Which type of clients / customers do you want to avoid
- How will you take payment for the product / service
- How much work: time and effort are you willing to put into the business each day
- Will you need to work with anyone, if so who and how will you keep them focused
- How much you’d like to make a month and if this is possible
- Are you willing to do the activities needed to promote the business on a regular basis
- Would you like to run the business for more than 10 years
- If you hope to sell the business at some point, what kinds of companies buy this business and do they pay a good multiple?
How and when to use the list
Keep this list on your phone – keep it with you at all times. Whenever you come up with or stumble upon an interesting opportunity, before you consider taking it on, you need to run it through your validation checklist – this is especially true for those of you who are inclined to think “I can make it over a weekend and just see what happens”. You’ll waste the most time because you’ll never commit to one idea and see it through to completion.
The things that pass your Validation Checklist will be few but, worth further investigation. Possibly, worth building too.