Video Transcript: Ideas for a Business: Where Do Ideas Come From

You want to start a business maybe or you're full of enterprise. But you're not sure what exactly you should do. Where do ideas come from? Where do you get ideas to do a business?

1. Ideas come from creativity

Where does creativity come from? I read this book entitled Inventology, and it was a study of how people invent things. He went over several people who invented things and how they come up with these kinds of things. In that book, he writes, "We tend to believe that great ideas arrive like angels, in a flash of light. This assumption has been handed down to us from the ancient Greeks who have regarded creativity as a gift from the Muses. As the ancients saw it, people don't invent so much as wait for a deity to deliver an illumination."

In the Middle Ages, the word inspiration meant "God's hand breathed the truth straight into a person's mind". So do ideas just come from God? Well, ultimately, of course, ideas come from God. Genesis 1:27,28. "So God created mankind in his own image. In the image of God, he created them. Male and female, he created them. God blessed them and said to them, 'Be fruitful and increase in number. Fill the earth and subdue it.'"

Now, that word subdues, sometimes we think it means to conquer. But it also means to mess with it as God did. God started with something that was void and shapeless, and God formed it. He took what was there and he made it into something, and we are made in his image. So we do the same thing. We take what we see and we combine things that were not combined before, and we create something new out of those materials. So you start with creativity. What gets creativity going?

2. Problems

Generally, people get creative when they are faced with problems. James 1:2-4, it's one of my favorite couple of verses. "Dear Brothers and Sisters, when troubles of any kind come your way, consider it an opportunity for great joy." Do you have problems in your life? Consider those problems a joy. 1:4 "You know that when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow. So let it grow. For when your endurance is fully developed, you will be perfect and complete needing nothing." The Old Living Bible translation ended with, "and you will be ready for anything".

What problems do you have in your life? I have an example of Mr. Strap and the ball hopper. He was a tennis player, and he coached people in tennis. He would bring out 50 tennis balls and they would hit them around. Then after 15 minutes, they had to go pick them up and put them in a box. By the end of that 15 minutes, their backs were killing them. So because his back was killing him, he made this thing with wire and it was a grid. It was just a little bit smaller than the width of a tennis ball. You could just press it down on a ball, and it would go in, and it wouldn’t come out. So without bending down, he could do that. And he started manufacturing them. He sold thousands and thousands of them. His invention came out of his own pain, came out of his own need.

3. Lead user problems

Eventology, again this book, said: "Lead users are familiar with conditions which lie in the future for most others so they can serve as a need-forecasting laboratory." Some people are ahead of the curve. I know when Henry and I first started planting churches back in the late 80s, we were sort of the new breed of church planters in our denomination, and we started with gusto and enthusiasm. I mentioned this sort of vision before, we had the "build it and they will come" mentality. We had great services, great music. We would attract people to our service and ultimately, they would end up paying our salary.

Well, we got into that. We developed it. We did it as best we could. But after four or five years of that, we started discovering the problems. The problem was we were getting spectators and not players, people sitting on the bench, people relying on Sunday morning but not doing anything Monday through Saturday. So we saw those problems and we started shifting away from the "build it and they will come" mentality to The Seven Connections. We have to build people in their own lives. By the time we were shifting to The Seven Connections, the rest of the denomination was finally catching up to this whole thing about "build it and they will come". So we were on to the next thing and the vast majority was doing the thing that we'd already done for three years. That's the way most things go. By the time people catch up to something, it's already old.

It's so funny to me that when people name their children, they think long and hard about a special name just for their child. And it's going to be a unique name, not a name that they grew up with. So they center on this name for their child. They think it's unique, and they think no one else is going to be named this. But when that kid goes to school, you'll discover that there might be two or three with that exact same name. You thought it was unique, but the only reason why you thought it was unique is because other people were already using it and you weren't even aware that other people were using it. By the time you caught on, it had become a common thing.

You can just Google it. You can just go and Google the name of your child and you'll probably discover the name you uniquely picked out is in the top 30. People will do this, and they'll be surprised that the name that they chose is just a common one that everyone else shows as well.

My point is, if you want to be ahead of the curve, you have to identify those people who have been doing something a long time. They've discovered some things that don't work. They're on to the next thing. And that's the next paradigm. The next paradigm comes when everyone's jumping on the bandwagon of the old paradigm. So you want to follow a lead user. Talk to them about what problems they see.

4. Needs

What are your needs? I talked to you about this personal bible cover thing that I have going in my garage. I inherited it from The Bible League, and I was sending out New Testaments. I was sending out King James New Testaments. A lot of ministries wanted to use the King James Bible. And they would use them for evangelism. They'd put their cover on it and use them for evangelism. To me, I just felt bad about doing it because here's the new person. They're going to get this New Testament from somebody from some ministry and they'll open it up, and they won't understand some of the words that are in there because it's King James. It's English words from 500 years ago.

That so frustrated me that people were using the King James for evangelism. They had reasons for choosing the King James that I wouldn't dispute with, so I wanted to help them out. So I spent two months, I sat down and I took the 1611 King James and I decided I'm going to add some things to it that will help a new person get something out of it. I added three things. I added chapter headings. The King James was a wall of words. A chapter heading, that's what's in this chapter. Jesus Walks on the Water. So you can kind of see where you're at. I added quotation marks when people speak because the original King James didn't have quotation marks. And I added, in parentheses, the explanation of words that we no longer use so that someone could read it and actually get something out of it. I called it King James Plus. It's the King James plus some of these help.

Now I spent two months doing that because I was frustrated with a problem that existed for years. I got frustrated with not having something good to hand to a visitor that came to our church, and that's why I did the Jesus Bible, and the Sampler Bible, and the 30 Second Bible. I wanted to give somebody something significant that tied them to my church but also something that could be used to help them grow in their faith.

So what are some of the needs that you're struggling with or some of the churches around you, what are they struggling with? So your needs, the needs of people you know, the needs of your customers, what is the problem that people are struggling with, and what product or service can you figure out from that?

5. Frustration

When you get frustrated with something, it often leads to some creativity and some kind of invention, some product or service that you can sell.

1. Frustration over a long period of time

Things that you've been frustrated continually. I was frustrated with our church sanctuary. It was set up the wrong way, so a year ago, I decided, "Let's transform this place." We took the ceiling tiles out, we spray painted it all black, we put in lights, our sound system was no good. I really went to town on this, and I became an expert in lighting. The lighting today is so easy to do. LED lighting, you don't need the power anymore. The control is amazing. You can use color. It's a lot cheaper.

And I didn't know any of these things. Now, I know these things. I just had a church meeting at my church. It was a church meeting of several local churches in my denomination, about 16 different churches. The leaders came to our building for the meeting, and they saw our lights. They were like, "Wow! How did you do this?" Not one of them, none of these 16 churches has lighting like this. They have the old-fashioned kind of lighting, poor lighting, often the minister standing in the darkest place, which makes it hard to listen to him.

With very little effort, I have become an expert in church lighting. I could probably start a business in church lighting - just go to churches that have poor lighting and say, "For this price, I could dramatically transform your whole church sanctuary."

The same thing about sound. Because our sound was horrible. I learned how to do it. I learned how to do it on our own - hook it up, put it up, where to get the deals, all that kind of stuff. Churches will spend $50,000, $60,000, $80,000 on a sound system, and they don't have to. Because I was frustrated for many years and finally did something about it, now I know about this stuff. I know where to go, I know what to do, and if I really wanted to, I could start a business in that arena.

2. Frustration that reveals hidden problems that are difficult to detect

There's a lot of problems in life, but the real problems you figure out after a long period of frustration. What is the real problem here? What is the real problem with having people come and visit your church and returning again? What do we really have to do to get them to come back again? Where are we dropping the ball? That could be a business.

3. Frustration that forecasts a problem that will affect thousands if not millions of people

             If you go deep enough into a problem, you could actually figure out a solution that could affect
             millions of people.

Where do ideas come from? Ideas come from a desire to find a better way.

Colossians 3:23 "Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart as working for the Lord, not for human masses since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. In the Lord Christ, you are serving." A desire to find a better way.

As I mentioned way at the beginning of this course, my father was an entrepreneur. He started many different businesses. He died this past August and we had taped his thoughts on several things that he had to say about his life. He told several stories. One of the stories he told was how he got interested in business. When he was 12 years old, he worked on, what we call in Michigan, a muck farm. It's a flat piece of ground, it's very fertile, and you grow a lot of vegetables on this muck farm. And it's a lot of backbreaking work. You're bent over the whole time, and young people are hired. They go out and they work from sunup to sundown. They're bending over. Their backs are killing them, and they get paid very little.

So my dad went out and did that with all of his friends, and he lasted three days. After three days, he quit. He quit with this thought, "There's got to be a better way to make a living than working on the muck farm." So he quit and so then what was he going to do? Well, he went by some of these factories and at noon they'd all come outside. They'd have their lunch and so on. So he had an idea. He bought a bike, and he put a sidecar on the bike, and he put an insulated box, and bought dry ice and he put it in the box. Then he went to an ice cream place, and he bought - at wholesale - a bunch of ice cream bars. Then he would go to these factories at lunchtime or at the break time, and he'd open it up and say, "Who wants an ice cream?" And he'd make people flip for it. You and your friend, someone flips a coin and if it lands on heads, he buys. And the next day, the other guy buys.

So he had a route, and he went around and he discovered that he could make four times as much money just riding his bike, talking to people, selling ice cream bars rather than sitting in the hot sun in the muck farm.

So at a very young age, he realized that there's a way that people do things. Then there's a better way. There's always a better way, and that's how I knew him. He was always trying to find a better way to do something. He started like 20 different businesses. And each one, he was trying to, "How can we do this better?"

I remember we were just driving down the road, and he saw a farmer on his tractor. He stops the vehicle, and he gets out of the car, and he flags the guy down. He's in a field plowing, or disking, or something, and he flags him down. The guy stops, gets off his tractor, shuts it down, and says, "What do you want?"

He says, "I want to ask you what you're doing." Now, my dad had no idea what it was or what the business was or what the potential was, but he wanted to know what he was planting and why he was planting what he was planting, what kind of yield it was, how does this pay?

Then we got back into the car, and I said, "Why did you stop him?"

He said, "Well, there might be a business here. I don't know." Then he gave me this lecture that you should always be curious. Be curious about how everything goes. When you're with someone, find out what they do and find out the details of what they do and how it works, because there might be a business in there for you. Or someday, somehow, you'll be doing something and this knowledge will come back to you, and you'll have this connection to this person. Take an interest with everyone around you so that you become knowledgeable about everything. There's a business lurking behind everything.

On the way here, I was driving down the freeway, and I was trying to think of this class and what I might say and so on, then I started looking at the highway, thinking, "What kind of business is on this road?" And I started looking at the cars. The backs of me were license plates, license plates, license plates, license plates. That's it. Then somebody had a bumper sticker, something about some sports team, and that was it. There were hardly any bumper stickers. Well, if I was looking for a business and I'm a Christian entrepreneur, I would get really cool window clings that people can put in the back of their window. But make them really cool about Christianity. Not "Do you know Christ or you're going to hell kind of thing". We have Christian bumper stickers now, but no one puts them on their car because they're too crass. They're not subtle enough. So I would come up with really cool things that people would really want to put on their car.

In the United States, we have 80 million, or 100 million, or 150 million Christians and we drive everywhere. But our cars don't communicate anything of our faith. I could go to churches and I could maybe sell these things if I could come up with-- my point is there's a business everywhere. If you just have your eyes open - your clothes, the belts. I thought about my belt. How come my belt doesn't say anything about my faith? My clothes advertise some manufacturer that makes clothes or some brand. What do I care about that brand? I want to advertise the thing that's important to me. Maybe I should come up with a Christian brand. I don't know.

You have to be curious about how everything works. Think about the possibilities everywhere you look. Start with the kitchen. What could you do in the kitchen? What can you do in the family room? What is there to invent in the garage? Keep your eyes open. The desire to find a better way.

Personal Experience

Jobs that you've had, your education, your interests, all these things. When I look at the things that I've started, it came out of my own experience. I have this sort of "can do" attitude about everything. With our church, we're going to renovate things and people say, "Oh, that'll be too expensive."

I said, "We can do it on our own." I wanted to dig a big hole at our church. Our church has a really low ceiling. I said, "Why can't we just dig a big hole and go down?"

People said, "That's impossible. You can't get a big crane or a steam shovel thing or a hoe thing through the doors."

I said, "What if we had shovels?"

"How are we going to dig a big, huge hole with shovels?"

"I don't know. If we had 200 people with 200 shovels, how much could you dig?"

I'm just so surprised how people think you can't do anything. Part of why I think you can do anything is when I was 15 years old, we moved onto a farm. My dad wanted to build a barn, and he wanted to do the cement of the barn. It was 100-foot x 50-foot barn. I had a brother who was 14 years old. What my dad did, he bought a big pile of gravel. Then he bought a big pile of sand, and then he bought a big skid of Portland cement and a cement mixer and a wheelbarrow. And he said, "This is how you do it, guys. You take a couple of shovels of this, couple shovels of that, a couple of shovels of the sand, you throw it in the mixer, add a little water, you mix it, you dump it into the wheelbarrow, you bring it into the barn and you drop it. You do that about 10,000 times, and you've got the floor of a barn."

That's what we did. We did the whole barn floor by hand, one shovel at a time. And you know what? It got done. You keep doing it, it gets done. Things can be done. That's my past experience. Because it was my past experience, I take that with me. I worked on the farm, I worked in a warehouse, I went to school for eight years, I've done a lot of bible studies and a lot of sermons over the last 30 years. So when I go to write a bible study, it's fairly simple. When I write a book, it's fairly simple because I've been doing this kind of same sort of thing for 30 years. All my past comes to play into my present right now.

Right now, I'm working with someone to make a children's book for Christmas. But it's going to be a unique book because each book will be unique to that person. We're going to put their name into the story. We're going to put their picture into the story. We're trying to figure out the software to do that. I've been writing stories all my life. I know I can do this. I know it because of my past experiences.

So what jobs have you had in your past? Write them all down. What did you learn from them? What is education? You might start something in an area that you already know something about. What are your interests? Start there.

The experience of people you know

Your parents

Again, I mentioned my father. My father started many different things, and he talked about them incessantly. I know almost all the things that he knows because he talked about them constantly.

Your siblings, your brothers, your sisters

What they're into. Again, be inquisitive as to what people are doing. You can learn from them.

Your schoolmates

Your friends, your former employees, all these different people have all this vast experience. Mine it, go through it. What is in all of that that you might do?

The experience of people that you admire, successful people you know, successful people connected to your network, successful people you know about. Successful people I know: Henry Reyenga, the president of CLI, he's a successful person that I know. I'm good friends with him, and we constantly talk. I learn from him. He can learn from me. Successful people connected in your network. Rich DeVos was someone that was connected to our network, our Dutch network. Because of that, we could connect with him. I learned a lot of things from him.

Successful people, you know about

I know about Rick Warren. I've met him a couple of times. We're not like good friends or anything, but I did have a chat with him. I read some of his books. I can learn from a successful person that I know about.

Find out what people want

How do you find out what people want? If you're going to start a business or a service, what do people really want? How do you find out what people want? Talk to them. You have to talk to them. Go out, meet them.

What do people want in your family?

Talk to your family, talk to your spouse. "What do you want?"

Talk to your friends. What do your friends want? Just broad, general questions. "Really what do you want in life?" They may say something that may relate to something that you know about that you can provide a product or a service. What is the culture, what is the city, the village that you happen to live in? What do they need? Talk to people. Talk to the mayor. Talk the people running the thing. What do people want? Is it education? Is it some kind of a product? Or don't people know what they want? You have to get out and talk to people.

Figure out what people might want

You can ask people what they want, and they can tell you. A lot of people are just going to say the same old thing. Sometimes you have to come up with something that they might want that they don't even know that they wanted. There's a famous quote by Henry Ford. "If I ask my customers what they wanted, they would've said a faster horse. They wouldn't have said a car."

Steve Jobs had that same idea about the iPhone and all the things, the Apple computer and all those kinds of things. People didn't know they wanted a personal computer until it was invented.

Be a curious, observant person

From the book, Inventology again. "In the 1990s, the British psychology professor, Richard Wiseman, began to suspect that people who feel lucky tend to be especially observant and that their ability to scan their surroundings makes it easier for them to notice useful clues in their environment. And he did a little test with this. He got a bunch of people into a room and he gave them a newspaper, and he said, "I want you to go through this newspaper and find out how many times the word football or some word is used in this newspaper. Just count how many times. At the end, put the paper down and you're done." There was like 15 times that the word was there. Some people scanned the thing and looked and looked and looked and looked and finally came up with the number 15 after 15 minutes. Some people got it within a minute. The people that got it within a minute scanned it and they saw on page two - there was a little thing that said, "The answer is 15." They saw that. They didn't have to go through the whole thing to get the answer of 15. They saw it there in a little box. So half of them never saw the box. They were so intent on finding the word that that's all they were doing. They weren't that observant.

So he concluded that people that we say, "Wow, they're lucky. They fell into this. They started this business, and it succeeded." This author's point is observant people tend to succeed. Lucky things tend to happen to those who are paying attention - paying attention to people, paying attention to what they say, paying attention to the connections.

Have a strong desire to really help people

From Inventology again. Some of the most gifted inventors listen to constituents and develop a kinship with sufferers. They see the problem through other eyes. Perhaps most important, they feel the urgency to help others, a kind of second-hand pain that cracks open the mind. If you have a strong desire to really help people 2 Corinthians 9:8. "And God is able to bless you abundantly so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work."

Ultimately, if you are going to start a business, if you are going to have a product or a service that makes a difference, that people are willing to pay for, that may help compensate you so that you can do ministry, ultimately, you have to be a blessing to people.

Your product or your service has to be a blessing to people, and you have to genuinely care about people. If all you care about is you making money, ultimately, your product and service will not meet the needs of the people around you. You have to meet the needs of those that are around you.

Fail forward

Starting anything is a matter of trial and error. You're not going to hit it out of the park first time up to bat. You've got to keep going. You didn't learn how to walk right away. You fell many times. Every time you fall, it's just an opportunity to get up and try something different.

Testing ideas

You have to test your ideas. It sounds brilliant to you, it sounds brilliant to someone else, but will anyone buy it? Let the marketplace teach you. You don't have to figure everything out. That's what's cool about the marketplace. The marketplace will teach you what you could never figure out on your own. So you go out, and you try to make things happen. You try to sell things, and no one buys it. Well, you have to fix it. Maybe it's too expensive. Maybe it's not the right thing. Your market will tell you exactly what you need to do. But you have to be willing to fail to learn a new thing.

Ecclesiastes 9:11 "Again I saw that under the sun, the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to those with knowledge. But time and chance happen to them all." It's keep going, it's trying, it's learning from your failures. That's where the success is.

Find a partner

Again, nothing can be done alone. You need the help of other people. Ecclesiastes 4:9, 10 "Two people are better off than one for they can help each other succeed. If one person falls, the other can reach out and help. But someone who falls alone is in real trouble."

When you have a partner, everything is doubled - double the effort, double the time, double the eyes, double the past experience. Everything is doubled.

Perseverance

You cannot start anything without hanging in there. There's a lot of failures, there's a lot of trouble, there's a lot of obstacles, and those who win are those who keep going. I give the example of Christian Leaders Institute. I remember when Henry first started it. He was in Chicago. I was in Michigan. I remember that first year, we had six students. They had to come to Chicago for two days at the end of a class. So I had to drive all the way to Chicago to teach six people something. Three of them were people that shouldn't have been in that class. The next year, there was like 16, and the next year, there was like 30. All that effort, all that putting courses online, all that stuff and there was hardly anything there.

Now, there are thousands, and thousands, and thousands, and thousands. But you have to hang in there long enough to get there.

Keep your eye on the prize

Philippians 3. This is one of my favorite verses. "Not that I've already obtained all this or have already arrived at my goal,"-- this is Paul talking-- "but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me. Brothers and Sisters, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it, but one thing I do is forgetting the past." Yeah. "I've failed, I've tried this, I've done this. I'm forgetting the past, forgetting what is behind, and straining toward what is ahead. I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me, having been born in Christ Jesus."

Remember, the goal is the kingdom of God. The goal isn't business. The goal isn't money. The isn't product or services. The goal is the kingdom of God. We do all this product and services. We make money to take care of our families. We do it so that we can influence people, be in people's lives, make a difference in people's lives, ultimately for the kingdom so that we can share Christ. That's why you're doing this. See, you have to have that in the background - that, "I am doing this, not ultimately for some glory business that I create with my name on it. This is for God's kingdom. I'm here for a short period of time, and we've got this stuff to do. God gave us this thing called enterprise. But it's here to make a difference."

If I have that in the background, then I'm just exploring God's wonderful creation with all the variety and all the things going on. What part of his creation could I do? I don't know, so I'm going to try this. I could fail. Okay, fine. I'll try this or try that. I'm going to keep going. I'm going to persevere because I have my eye on the prize - the ultimate prize. So keep thinking, keep dreaming, keep looking to God. Pray about it. Put it before him. "Lord, what is it that you want me to do? What could I do?"