In this episode, Idea to CEO, we take you on a journey through 4 key elements to building your business, going through the Idea, Development, Commercialisation and Growth.
Neema Amin (MBA) – Escape Strategist, is a business coach supporting freelancers, consultants and micro businesses to obtain financial freedom and create a life and business they love. She has built several 6 figure businesses over more than a decade of Entrepreneurship.
Katherine Ann Byam (MBA, FCCA) is a sustainability business strategist, consultant and career coach. She is the founder of Dieple, Digitally Enabling People, A digital transformation consultancy firm based in the UK helping start-ups to scale up, and coaching executive business leaders.
Together we run a group and a purpose-driven movement called collectively driven, a community for women to grow sustainable businesses and incomes for their families. We formed this collective as we wanted to make an impact using collaboration as our model. We believe in a system that serves everyone and not just a few. We believe in levelling up incomes so that we all can live an outstanding life.
Katherine Ann Byam 0:01
Today, our guest is Neema Amin. Neema serves as a coach, advisor, and sounding board to founders and entrepreneurs, helping them to reach their vision by defining the fine details, and merging this with the clarity and core values to achieve their vision of success.
By the age of five, Neema lived in three different countries, spoke three languages fluently, and was a regular guest accompanying her dad to work. She knows what it takes to build something from the ground up. Welcome to the show, Neema.
Neema Amin
Thank you so much for having me, Katherine. It's wonderful to share another forum with you.
Katherine Ann Byam
Neema and I are business partners at Collectively Driven. And this is a group designed for people who are underrepresented and who want to grow businesses that they love, and purpose-driven businesses. And one of the things that we go through in this group is that journey of going from idea to CEO. And this is what we're going to be talking to you about today. So this session is going to be a little bit more fluid and a little bit more mixed between Neema and myself. Typically, we like to start with “mission.” And I wanted to know from your perspective, how important is the mission in getting your idea to grow?
Neema Amin 1:18
It's incredibly important because if you don't know why you want to start something and what you are aiming to grow, then you have no foundation essentially. Your business and your idea is a combination of your values and your desires. It's mixing the financial alongside the responsibility. So your mission essentially compresses all of those things.
Katherine Ann Byam 1:49
I totally agree. I like to call it a question. So it's really about the question, the problem that you want to solve in the world is formed by a question, which you then need to tailor somehow. And this is when we get into the jobs to be done or the problems to be solved for your customers. So I like to poke on this a bit. Because often we want to solve a problem that we have imagined exists. But maybe that's not the only way to do it.
Neema Amin 2:20
Exactly. And I think when we start out as entrepreneurs, we have a desire to execute on a product or a service because we are really excited about it. It's something that we want to do. And starting out, most entrepreneurs, myself included, actually going out there and talking to people about it is really scary. Because what if somebody tells you it's rubbish or people aren't interested. You're not also ready to hear, "that's a terrible idea. I don't think you should go forward with it." But it saves you so much time by actually going and asking those really tough questions at the beginning as opposed to getting much further down the line, getting absorbed by your idea and finding that it doesn't solve a problem or it's not an idea that your audience is ready for right now. They need something before that idea to get them to your actual idea. So you've got to think about it from lots of different perspectives.
Katherine Ann Byam 3:26
Absolutely. I agree. And I think one of the one of the safest ways to approach this is kind of looking at the job that your customer is trying to get done within the context of the idea that you have, what problems are they facing with that job. And the way to go about this is to get into market research. And I think a lot of people are daunted by market research, and I think it's where most entrepreneurs fail. I don't know what your thoughts are.
Neema Amin 3:51
Absolutely 100%. I am yet to work with a client that hasn't done the market research and is excited about the market research. I guess I'm a little bit of a freak who could stay in the research and analysis rabbit because that's my background. That's how I started my work. But most people are so excited to move on and actually bring their idea that product to life that they feel that they themselves are the research that they know that this is what the market wants. And unfortunately you have to ask the market.
And as an entrepreneur, you've got to be pretty thick skinned to hear, "You're not good at this or I guess you're not good at this. Your service or your product is not good for me." But I guess people don't quite phrase it that way. You know market research is tough because it's a process and most people don't like to follow a process. As an entrepreneur you think you just go and do things. You don't. There's a strategy behind it. It's a structured approach. You can start small by not going out and talking to people. You can do the book work around it. But at some stage, you've got to go and talk to your potential customers to find, do I actually solve a problem? Or am I the problem? And I need to find a different idea to solve a different problem?
Katherine Ann Byam 5:19
Absolutely. And I think that there are ways that these daunts you as well. Because if you don't find the right client to speak to about the idea, you can get misinformation, right? So you can get either false endorsement or false discouragement. So this is why when we get deeper into this whole concept and in the development of your idea, you really need to start thinking about a niche, an ideal client, and about finding the places where your niches are where your ideal clients hang out.
Neema Amin 5:57
Absolutely. So when you are doing your research, I generally recommend that you keep all your questions really open ended. People like talking. There's nothing that people like doing better than talking about themselves and about the issues that they're trying to solve. So don't box them in by asking, "Do you want this? Or do you want that." No tick boxes, keep it open ended.
The idea behind niching is that you can't solve a problem really really well if you are trying to solve it for ten different clients that will have ten slightly different issues. The idea of niching is really getting into that crux of who is that client that has these characteristics that has these issues that I can really focus on and create a product or service that is perfect that they will sing and dance about buying from me. That is niching and finding your perfect client.
Katherine Ann Byam 7:03
Absolutely. And I also think that with the open ended, you could still get things wrong, because when people phrase things in a certain way, there's an interpretation issue. So I like the idea of having a prototype - minimum viable product. And people look at me like, "I'm not building a product...” sometimes “so why do I need to do this?" What's this MVP about? But I think it's also relevant to service-based industries and companies, and ideas of coming up with a beta - a small version that you can test and really get the true feedback.
Neema Amin 7:40
Yeah, I guess it's just working in an agile way. If you're a solo business or a partnership, you can react to the feedback that you get from your clients even in the beta version like "I didn't like this, but I think I'd like more of that." So you can adapt very quickly. And that's quite difficult for a lot of corporations to do in the traditional sort of waterfall methodology that's used, which is why they're also moving to agile.
So the idea behind the MVP, I think even we've done this in our business where we went in with an idea of these are the kinds of clients we want to serve. And once we started taking action and talking to people, we started moulding it a little bit more around those ideal clients. So until you take some action and build out the building blocks of that MVP, it's difficult to move on without spending a lot of time or money on building something that might not be needed.
Katherine Ann Byam 8:45
And I think that the testing and the feedback is also important in terms of capturing the quality of it, capturing the white space of it. Right. So I think a lot of people we look at what's there without looking at what's not there and asking the right question about what's not there as well. So I think this is also quite an important step in the journey.
Neema Amin 9:09
I think with most product services, you are always looking to continuously improve on it, because you never sit on your product or your service. You always want to make it better. So the question that you can ask is what could we have done better? What did you feel that it was missing something? What would you like to see more of in the next product? You can be that honest with your customers. Because if you can't ask straightforward questions, you're not going to get those answers. They can't read your mind and you clearly cannot reverse.
Katherine Ann Byam 9:52
So true. Words have never been said. So the next bit, I think that when we're moving through this is you're getting ready to commercialise this thing, so you're really getting ready to, I would say your first tier of scaling, it's not the mass scaling yet, but you're starting to scale the idea into something that's a viable legitimate item or product - whatever it is. So you kind of need a strategy for that. And I want to tease out a little bit about going to market strategy from your perspective.
Neema Amin 10:28
I normally recommend having a soft launch because when you go all out with that big old launch, I think it puts a lot of pressure on you, it puts a lot of pressure on your product or your service as well, too. I guess I think of it in the big corporate launches, if you've got all of this going on. Even the corporate world is learning that a soft launch is not the end of the world. So you can soft launch with your MVP. And that's the way of teasing out what some of your clients find useful in that product. Getting those testimonials at that point as well.
If something failed in that product, whether it was your tech or part of the service wasn't great, you can improve that and put it into your bigger launch. And you've also got to work backwards from that launch date. So part of your strategy is looking at how big your product or your service is. And you can do this in terms of the overall price that you're charging for it, the size of the audience that you're looking at, and work backwards. So I normally recommend anything from two and a half months to sort of start putting information out there, what are you starting to do? What is this product or service about? Start warming up any partners that you're working with?
So I did this a lot with partnership-based businesses where you would have your partners going out to their partners to sort of tell them a little bit. And this is when we could do things face-to-face over lunch and over coffees like, "Hey, this client is bringing out this new product and it does X,Y Zed. Do you think you know you might be interested in it?" So getting all the arms of your business to start working for you. So you're not doing everything all the time?
Katherine Ann Byam 12:24
Absolutely. I love that you mentioned “launching” because launching is a big deal. I don't mean to scare you but launching is really consolidating your effort into one space, one channel, and I don't mean one channel in terms of one media channel, but it is about the effort that you're putting in toward one thing.
And especially if you want to be honest, it works for products as well as service-based businesses how you do at the launch phase. If you're a product base, you want to make sure that your stock is available in multiple places and multiple points so that once you bring that social media, or you leverage whatever media you're using to do your launch, it's all in place for you. So there's a lot of pre-work leading up to launch. And you really want to make sure that when you're doing your big splash launch, that you have synchronised every possible step of the way.
Neema Amin 13:21
Absolutely. And also, if your launch isn't going well, and that can happen, you can start looking at what are the points that are not going well? Start identifying what's not working, where are those issues? What can we do to turn this around? If you're not getting interest, where are the sticking points? Is it something to do in your process? Or are your customers not being reached? What is that? So that's the other reason for having that launch period over a longer period of time. So you can actually address those issues as you go along.
Katherine Ann Byam 13:55
Absolutely. And it speaks to your point about being agile as well and almost doing a pre-mortem as you say, working with what could possibly go wrong. What are the things that technically happen to other people and doing that pre-mortem helps to save you some time in the process as well. I think a lot of people when they get to this point, "Well, I'm just gonna fly. I'm just gonna get in my wings and I'm gonna fly," which is great because you're going to need that optimism.
You're definitely going to need the optimism to carry you through the points when it gets messy. But don't underestimate the importance of one, having a team to support that (which has probably a different way of thinking) but also in getting the steps in place so that you can anticipate and really see early on when the warning signs come. And I think a big part of this is metrics, right?
Neema Amin 14:55
Exactly. To be honest with you, I think you're taking “big corporation” thinking and putting it into your small, tiny business. The difference is you are small so you can be agile and move incredibly fast. You are the decision maker so you're not putting it in front of a different board and going through ten different meetings. You can move that quickly. As to the metrics, you've got to be looking across your channels - “Where are we doing well? Where are we not doing well and need further reach?” This couldn't be organic growth that you're looking at, reaching out through collaboration, through partnerships, and obviously, there is the paid route as well depending on which channel you're using.
Katherine Ann Byam 15:47
Yeah. Also, we couldn't underestimate the importance of tech. I mean, regardless of the type of business you run, we all need digital messaging. And part of that is the tech that you set up to support your launch. And the tech ranges. You can do chatbots, email marketing, social media, or guerrilla marketing. There's so many approaches that you could take great, but you need to have the tech to leverage this and to scale this especially when you have a small team of people working on this. Any tech tech tips that you've had on your journey, Neema?
Neema Amin 16:34
I would say keep it simple. Keep it inexpensive to start with. Because if you're not bringing anything in, you don't want to be spending thousands of thousands. On the tech. Once you've started doing your analysis and you've launched, you'll start understanding what kind of tech you actually need to build up this business because what you thought you might need might not be the ideal platform for you.
And remember, just as it is in a logical prep, once you're on a platform, and you've grown, it is incredibly expensive and complex to move to another platform. So be absolutely sure that what you're buying is actually what you need. But my advice is keep it simple to start with. You don't have to be perfect going out to market. You're nimble. You're small. It's okay to be imperfect. Perfection is overrated. I think I can't remember who said it. But there is an entrepreneur that said, "If you look at your first MVP and not be embarrassed, then you should be embarrassed that you're not embarrassed, it should be that ugly." And I know some of the things that you and I have done, I look at them and I think, "Oh my God, really we put this out there?" But we learned from it. And that's what it is, it's putting yourself out there and learning about it.
Katherine Ann Byam 17:59
Absolutely. Then we get to that point that we've done our first commercialisation, and we need to start thinking about scaling and growth in a really big way (and the way that you do that for service and product-based businesses could be slightly different.) For product-based businesses, especially if you're a sustainable supplier, you really need to think about a lot more things.
You need to think about the ethics involved, you need to think about ethical sourcing and do all of that research. If you want to have a third-party contract manufacturer for your product, etc. You need to think about who you're working with wherever they are in the world, and what are the standards, modern slavery, and all of these things. So there's a lot of complexity involved in a product-based business when you're looking to start scaling up. And for service businesses, it's about outreach, and connecting with more people.
Neema Amin 18:58
Yeah, absolutely. You should still be doing organic growth.
You should still be creating those relationships. But as you're growing and expanding, your time is going to become limited so you need to look at other ways of growing. So this can be through expanding your product range. This can be through (I think you're going to touch on this) partnerships, collaborations, and I think you touched on a really interesting point about the sort of people that you want to do business with.
And even in service-based businesses, there was a client who entered into a partnership with a partner that had questionable ethics and this is where it gets really tough. Do you want to expand fast and reach that goal? Or do you hold on to your ethics? And that's, I think, a really personal question for every entrepreneur to answer. My answer won't be the same as everybody else's. But there will be tough spots, because your desire to grow is going to play with your, with your ethics and your values.
Katherine Ann Byam 20:11
And I think this almost takes us back to the beginning because it is kind of above that mission that you start with, who do you want to be as a business owner that will help you through these extremely difficult moments?
Neema Amin 20:25
That's a really good point, I think. So, you know, obviously in big offices you have the mission statement, or you used to have it open at reception. Clearly, we can't do that in our home offices. But I think we need to find ways to remind ourselves of what those core values are. Of course, you know the right thing to do but sometimes you need a little nudge.
Katherine Ann Byam 20:46
Absolutely. And the last point (and by far, not the least) is about the whole business development and sales piece. And you know, when I talk to solopreneurs and stuff, I think this is easily the biggest challenge anyone faces - how to reach more clients, how to convert clients, how to take those leads into funds.
Neema Amin 21:11
It is the toughest part because nobody, or let's say very few people like doing sales. No one likes being sold to. And I think that's part of the problem. You know, when you're having a conversation with somebody, as soon as they dip into that conversation, “So I have this great product..” and you think, "Ah, you're gonna to sell to me," and unfortunately that is part of it. But this is all part of your building a relationship. You know, you don't go into a conversation saying, “so I'm gonna sell this to you.” You warm up your audience.
You warm up those relationships about what you're about, where you have some energy. And as you're expanding, you've got to find other ways of selling other channels. You can't rely on that one-to-one that one-to-few, you've got to be doing that one-to-many. So it's a lot about putting yourself out there. So getting rid of those working on those sort of mind blocks that you have around selling. It's almost as if you've got to play a different part. You've got to pretend you're somebody else, not actually somebody else but get in that mode of, "Okay, I'm the super saleswoman, and I'm gonna knock this out."
Because when you just go in as Neema is trying to sell. it's like Neema is hiding under a table, hiding behind our hands, and telling you that, "it's an okay service, if you really want to give me some money for it." But Neema the super saleswoman is not going to do that. She's going to tell you that, "hey, this is a great product, you should be so lucky to be buying this from me. And if you don't buy it, you're missing out." It's about putting yourself out there.
Katherine Ann Byam 22:56
Absolutely. And I think I think it's a challenge for a lot of people, but it's really about as you say being authentic in what you're selling, and in the value that you bring. And it's important to step into that and really think about your product as you enjoying it. So when you even come up with whatever messaging you want to message around your product or your service, it's really about stepping into, "how would I feel? What difference would it make to me if it were me consuming it?"
And this is your litmus test before you even go before someone? How would I feel about paying this much or working in this way or getting this additional bonus, or getting this feature that you want to add to your product. You really need to step into “how would I feel” in addition to all the research that you've done. So this helps you to become the persona as you talked about.
Neema Amin 23:55
Exactly. If you don't love your product, how can you sell it?
Katherine Ann Byam 24:01
So this was a really wonderful session. Thank you so much for joining us and for having this open conversation. I think it's great that we can share these tips with a lot of people. If you want to find out more about what we do, you can search for us I have a “Women In Sustainable Business” group on Facebook that you can also search for, and you can get into these communities and learn about what we're doing and how we're helping businesses to grow in these interesting times.
Neema Amin 24:35
Absolutely perfect. Come join us. All right, thanks very much for joining the show.