3 Ninja Tactics To Leverage Your Big Ideas

How often do you find yourself daydreaming and a big idea pops into your head? Or you might wake up at 3am with your mind racing thinking about a business opportunity. What do you do when this happens?

More importantly, what actions do you take to make your big ideas come
to life?

3 ninja tactics to leverage your big ideas

1. Project Board

Whether a melody to the next big hit, the plot to a blockbuster movie or a tweak to your business model, big ideas must be captured. Or they just float away. Never to return.

Whatever medium you use, just write it down. Have notepads in your car, office and satchel. Just make sure you write it down before it goes. These ideas tend to disappear faster than last week’s pay. They simply float in and float out of your mind.

That’s why you must establish a project board.

A project board is simply a list of all your big ideas, your potential projects.
It doesn’t matter whether you capture these big ideas in the notes function of your phone, on an app, saved in a Word document or spreadsheet, scrawled in a notepad or written in red lipstick on your bathroom mirror, write them all down in one place once you’ve captured your ideas.

Have a project board in your office. It’s helpful to reflect on it and muse on what you might tackle next.

2. Clusters

Clusters are the different revenue streams that you hope to generate from your big ideas. They can be new products or services you would like to offer. They might be a start-up business. You might want to buy a business.

They can be a creative project.

Treat a cluster as a big idea that might generate six figures of revenue or more per annum.

That is, $100,000 or more each year.

Of course, whether your big ideas will or won’t generate any revenue is academic at this point in time.

3. 90-Day Action Plans

So, now you have captured your big ideas on your project board.

You’ve thought about your big ideas in terms of clusters of annual revenue.
Next, decide what big idea you want to work on to create a potential cluster over the next 90-days.

Once you have chosen the big idea to try to make into a cluster, create a 90-day action plan. This 90-day action plan lists all the activities and actions you will attend to over the next quarter in relation to one specific big idea.
Create a spreadsheet with descriptions, comments outlining actions and deadlines.

Of course, some big ideas can’t be completed in just 90 days. However, by putting a short-term timeframe around your activity, you force yourself to push through the ‘heart’ of the work to see if the idea has merit.

At the end of the 90-days, you may have finished the project and can implement it into your business life and attempt to create a new cluster of revenue.

Alternatively, you may not have been able to complete the project and decide to push on based on the encouraging progress made in your 90-day action plan. Or sometimes, you discover that the big idea doesn’t have merit and is unlikely to create a cluster, so you drop it.

Start leveraging your big ideas

The power of these ninja tactics is that you work on four big ideas each year in addition to your existing business. Ideas that don’t fly are dropped.

But what if just one of these big ideas is born and creates a six-figure cluster? And next year you get to start working on four new big ideas.

So start bringing your big ideas to life. Introduce additional revenue streams to your business model and diversify risk.

Just don’t leave your big ideas in bed, or on the side of the highway while daydreaming, or on the train.

One thing is assured. Something will happen. And it could be big!

By Darren K Bourke
Published with permission from the International Institute of Directors and Managers (IIDM) – www.iidmglobal.com

Proteus Leadership is one of Australia’s premier leadership training and development companies. Proteus Leadership provides leadership courses and management training to a range of industries and assists organisations to build positive workplace cultures, implement change and Create Great Leaders. Proteus also facilitates a range of world-class management courses, workshops, conferences and events across Australia and beyond with the sole purpose of bringing leaders together to connect and grow.

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