The leap beyond Ideation
Entrepreneurship is a creative journey. But it’s a long and challenging road with lots of highs and lows. When you want to start your own venture, how and why are the common things to strike your mind. If you have an idea and want to build something out of it, answering these doubts is essential. Being stuck at a certain place is okay, but willing to move past it is necessary. For an entrepreneur, the Timmons model may be the way out.
Timmons’s model depicts the relationship between the three most essential factors in new ventures: resources, opportunities, and team. Quite simple right? But for most of us, identifying these factors might be the most challenging part of starting out. These very things that can guarantee you success can also be the cause of your downfall — no wonder why 90% of startups fail.
So now we know, as entrepreneurs, balancing these three factors is vital.
Getting back to the model, it defines, “the success of a venture is mostly dependent on the founder’s capabilities”. But what does that even mean? That means, as a founder, and a leader, you create and explore the opportunities and change them into competitive businesses. You are responsible for identifying the necessary resources and utilizing them properly. You must be able to influence and form a team of like-minded and enthusiastic individuals to drive the company. Easy? Oh, hell no!
If you are not mindful, most of your time can be consumed in obsessing about forming the right team, crafting a concise business model, and looking for the optimal opportunity.
Expanding more on how you can influence these three factors:
Opportunities
An idea needs refactoring on its feasibility for turning it into a business plan. According to the Timmons model, entrepreneurship is driven by opportunities. Opportunities can exist in various situations and forms. You must have an understanding of opportunity recognition. Opportunity recognition and discovery are a combination of spatial awareness, social networks, and professional or non-professional experiences.
Resources
Opportunities and business plans remain only in papers if they are not executed with the use of proper resources. Resources are the driving force of any entrepreneurial venture. However, the Timmons model tries to argue that not all resources must be intact before starting a new venture. It introduces the concept of bootstrapping.
Bootstrapping in entrepreneurship refers to the transformation of human capital into financial capital.
Making smart use of the available resources instead of massive spending on the unavailable ones is an essential trait in an entrepreneur. Optimal bootstrapping can drive your business towards financial stability.
Team
The team is an essential part of any venture. Identifying a business opportunity, managing the resources, making an operative and viable business plan is all carried out with a team.
A team is one of the driving forces of motivation.
A dynamic team helps to analyze the possibilities, threats, instruments to use, and so on. While effective teams can help you to broaden your perspective, ineffective teams can fail the business as a whole. Therefore, the founder must be able to gather good team members who can drive the company in a proper direction.
65% of startups fail due to co-founder conflict.
Identifying great partners is for the long-term game; not only do they play an essential role in the current business but also for future endeavors. Summing up, “Team is essential”.
Conclusion
Sometimes we can have the best ideas but don’t know how to pursue them. It’s common for everyone to get stuck in the ideation phase. Timmons model can help you address those issues and take your ideas one step forward.
As the saying goes, “If it was easy, everyone would do it.”, but it’s not, and YOU are doing it.
