Coming up with a Business Idea can happen in the most peculiar of ways. So best not to ask how it happened or even why it did, but to embrace it and go with it.
An Idea is Born – Coming Up With a Business Idea
With my husband’s and kids new found passion and lifestyle (read Finding Your Passion and Backstory here) our lives have opened up to new friendships and new conversations.
Usually what happens when you grow and become more open to what life wants to show you.
This particular time we were invited to a dinner party with another family whose husband and son mountain biked with my men. After dinner, without even thinking about it or initiating it, our chat moved into the direction of starting a business with biking or mountain biking.
Considering that my husband easily spends 2 – 3 hours daily on fixing his bike, learning all about parts, putting new ones on, fixing up the kids bikes and so and so forth, that it has almost become his work, yet there is no money to be made from any of this. This doesn’t include his 3-4 hour three times a week training sessions.
Since I’m an entrepreneur at heart, we’ve slowly started discussing ways for my husband to take his hobby, which was an obvious passion, and making it a livelihood. I mean he was learning, fixing, riding, practicing, nutritioning and everything else that you can possible think of when it came to mountain biking and biking in general for hours on end.
He shines every time we talk about biking and anything at all to do it with from the engineer, to cleaning to putting the parts on it, to taking it apart and examining every nook and cranny of his bike and each of our sons’ bikes.
When you are this into something, there is always a way to make it your livelihood not only a hobby.
Back to the dinner that changed the course of our lives – for the better. And why I’m gladly sitting here writing about it to help others have this moment as well.
Our friends, who are constantly on the look out for ways to go into business, started throwing ideas around.
Since the husband and son were into biking as well, we ended up discussing ways to do this and make money.
Brainstorming Ideas – Best Way to Get Creative and Work It
- Opening up a bike shop – not happening for us because we both don’t like retail. And the thought of sitting in a store for 10 – 12 hours a day sounds like a nightmare.
- Mountain biking school for kids – this at first seemed like a fun idea. However, after a long time of back and forth at home with my husband and me, we decided it was not going to happen. For one, way too much responsibility. And secondly, who has the patience to deal with a bunch of little kids. We have enough with our own. We love our sons, but that doesn’t mean they don’t drive us nuts. We put up with it because they are our sons. It won’t go off that easy with other little kids who won’t listen and do their own thing.
- Make a team – now this was an almost winner. The thing is, how can a team earn money? The thing is, you can’t make money. At least not with mountain biking. Teams in MTB aren’t the same as with team sports. It’s more of an individual sport, but you can represent something together. The best way to get anything is either through sponsorship or endorsements for equipment and races. But not actual money in hand unless you were one of the top elite riders, and that takes years and years. We want to work on something now.
- YouTube channel – This actually wasn’t brought up at the dinner, but one of the things that I kept on harping about at home. With all the time my husband was with his bike and doing all that he was, I thought it would be great to start to educate and do tutorials. Well, I’m not the only one who thought of this. There are tons of tutorials both in English and Spanish on YouTube already. And, quite frankly, we wouldn’t be offering anything super different to stand out in that crowd. No need to beat a dead horse. This idea, after a couple of months, was dropped entirely as well.
- Camp for kids – now this is when the wheels of motion started to come alive. But again, no one really wants to take care of a bunch of kids. However, for me, back to my WHY (read about Finding Your Why here), I started thinking beyond that. Family camp for mountain biking. I stored it in my head to put in as part of a jigsaw puzzle piece.
- Brand and Lifestyle Website – Ok, so this one didn’t come from the dinner either. However, the dinner put it into motion. And I thank that gathering for this particular idea. Below I go into how it expanded from there and how Mighty Mountain Bikers evolved into starting a new brand and lifestyle.
NOTE: It’s important to know what you definitely don’t want to do. There are many ways to do business. But if you do something that doesn’t align with you and what you want to do, it will not only make you resentful (even if you’re making money) but it will bring you to a place where you hate what you loved in the first place. And that is never the goal here.
Shaping Your Idea – Giving it Clarity – The Master of Everything
After our dinner outing, the wheels of creativity and motion started to take place. My husband was still thinking about the team part of it. OK, the reality was, he loved the team idea the most because as far as he saw was that parts for bikes are expensive and races cost money, why not get sponsorship and endorsements.
Since I’ve been doing business online for almost a decade, I also know that it takes a long time for that to happen. And unless you are a winning-all-the-time team, chances are they won’t be showering us with free parts and endorsements – just yet.
But I thought having that could be a great part, but definitely not the whole.
EXERCISE TIME
Brainstorming is one of my favorite activities and the kidz love it.
I have found that five minutes is more than enough for kids. Adults can definitely go for more. But I recommend sticking to the kidz time tables of concentration levels.
TAKE ACTION
Tell me what your kids came up with.
Naming the Business – the anchor to bring your ideas to the ground and start building from there.
Part 4 – Coming Up with the Name
Disclosure – before I go any further. I’m bringing this all bunched up together. However the timeline for all the different ideas and decisions was not quick. Some ideas happened immediately, others arrived to me in my sleep or during a work out weeks after talking. And new ones are happening each and every day.
A lot of time people think everything happens instantly. Sometimes it can take many months for you to have a solid grasp of what you want to offer, and then months more to build the infrastructure either online or brick and mortar style (both are very similar).
I wanted to take the opportunity and document every step of how it works after the idea has come to life and grows. But there is a tangible understanding of what it is about and what can be offered.
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