Why 'Why Wait?'

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I was slumped in the most comfortable, winged-headrest theatre seat in the swankiest conference venue ever. The lights were low, and another dull presentation was about to begin. I was hungover and planning to catch up on some sleep.

It had been a heavy night. Less than five hours previously, I had stumbled back along the Croisette. It was winter in the late nineteen eighties. I was a relatively new account manager with IBM at the annual sales conference in Cannes.

Eyes glazed and hanging on to consciousness, the presentation was a case study about a pilot project at the pharmaceutical giant Johnson and Johnson. Yawn. Another IBM account manager, the presenter, would be looking to feather his nest by impressing senior management. It would undoubtedly be boring as fuck.

Little did I know that the next forty-five minutes would change my life.

J&J had taken what was then the highly innovative step of putting one of those new-fangled personal computer thingies, free of charge, on the desks of their top high-volume buyers throughout the USA. (This was 1989; computers had only recently started to appear in offices.) Leased telephone lines linked these PCs to J&J’s inventory database, which showed the buyers what was in stock in real-time and provided the means of placing orders and receiving invoices at the touch of a button.

I sat bolt upright. Talk about an effective hangover cure. My head was clear. I experienced one of those rare once-in-a-lifetime moments when a brilliant idea strikes you from nowhere. I was suddenly wide awake!

It sounds so simple now, but the best ideas are often the simplest. It was a light-bulb revelation.  I had family in the hotel business and realised that the J&J system I was hearing about could be applied to hospitality.  A computer system that could give up-to-date information on hotel bedroom availability could revolutionise the labour-intensive methods of selling rooms. Given the high volume of transactions, a business that took a small commission on each hotel reservation could do very well.

That autumn I took a few hours away from my IBM job to attend the annual Hotel Technology exhibition at the Wembley Conference Centre. I saw demos of all the best hotel software available in the UK. I quickly realised that every product there was superior to our homegrown app. One product, in particular, stood out: IGS Hotel was owned by a big retail software company for which, as it happened, the hotel market had become a non-strategic sideshow. The department head, Mike, and his ten staff members loved their product but were demotivated by the lack of investment and interest from their directors.

Unbeknownst to me then, Mike was soon to become my business partner. 

Mike was looking for a business angel to buy out his hotel department and become Managing Director of a new dedicated hospitality software company. I was looking for a vehicle to advance my “inspired idea” of providing an automated sales channel for hotel reservations.  

Within six weeks, we had agreed terms, raised the finances, and were partners in our brand new company, with all ten employees (several of them shareholders). There are many ways to start your own business. We had just taken one of those routes: buying an existing concern from an owner who no longer saw it as a core to their business. We believed in it when they didn’t. We saw the potential while they were looking elsewhere.

Top tip: Don’t assume the only way to get your own business is to start one from scratch. Keep an open mind on potential opportunities. They sometimes pop up in the most unexpected circumstances.

In addition to the ‘million and one’ tasks to be completed when you set up a new company, I began pursuing my reservation project.  I saw it as a copy of the J&J model, where hotel bedrooms and their availability were the product. The travel agents, who already had terminals on their desks, were the buyers. It was a technical project to get minute-by-minute real-time bedroom availability data onto travel agents' screens, eliminating the need for multiple phone calls and time delays. 

As it transpired, I had completely misunderstood how the market worked. My eureka moment, my brilliant idea, was built of sand. It crumbled as it tried to get involved in the real world.

My brainwave changed my life, but as I was about to find out, not in the way I had expected.

                                                                                                                               (Extract from Chris's journey.)

People often say, 'I want to start my own business, but I haven't had the big idea yet.' That's the wrong way of looking at it. There are hardly any genuinely big breakthrough ideas out there. Most things have been done before. Very few "great, new" ideas are either great or new. You can look for the holy grail, but if you hold off from starting your business until you find it, you might be waiting a long time. You don't need an original idea; you just have to execute your concept slightly differently or better than anyone else.

Look at different businesses and imagine how you might differentiate them or make them better than the competition if they were your own. Take your local coffee shop, for example. Just say it's one of three in the vicinity. What might be the opportunities for differentiation? You could, for example, specialise in Bolivian coffee, offering different types of bean from there. You could put up some posters in the cafe that explain what's so special about coffee from that part of the world. Maybe hang some Bolivian artefacts on the wall and hold some Bolivian-themed events. Your customers probably won't know anything about Bolivian coffee; they might not even care that much, but the point is you will have given them something to think about and a hook to help them remember your place. If one of their friends asks them to recommend a local coffee shop, they're much more likely to think of that Bolivian place than if there was nothing distinct about your cafe. You will also have positioned yourself as someone who knows their coffee, and that will provide a level of quality reassurance for your customers. And you can, of course, continue to offer all the usual non-Bolivian coffees as well.

Alternatively, you could position your cafe as the social centre for your local neighbourhood. You might give it more of a community feel by adding a noticeboard for local messages, offering a discount for customers who live within a ten-minute walk away, and running special promotions to encourage local groups, such as young Mums who drop their children off at the school across the road, to use your cafe to meet up.

Top tip: Get in the habit of looking at different businesses. Imagine you own one of them. How might you differentiate it or make it better than its competitors? 

There are business opportunities all around us. It's just a matter of spotting them and then taking advantage of them. You don't have to have a great new idea. Improving a well-established product or service and differentiating yourself from the competition can be an equally powerful way of starting your own business.