A lot of designers out there have a lot of ideas about what their dream business would look like. And for many of them it stays just that – a dream. It takes a lot of courage to make a dream in your head turn into a real-life-pay-your-bills-send-your-kids-to-college-business.

I’m not a big fan of “make your dream a reality” rhetoric. But I am a fan of having a dream – even a big, scary dream – that becomes the foundation vision for your business. So I’m laying out a 6 step process to getting that dream business – for real.

Step 1) Dream it

Step 2) Plan it out

Step 3) Do the work

Step 4) Put it in your schedule

Step 5) Tweak the plan again

Step 6) Implement the damn plan

You see, most entrepreneurs stop around Step 3 or 4. Steps 1 and 2 are fun.

Doing the work is hard.

Staying on schedule is hard.

Sometimes you don’t know what work you should be doing and that can be frustrating. I once heard personal a tough love guru (Larry Winget) say. “Dreams don’t come true. PLANS come true.”  He makes an excellent point.

That’s why you need a strong vision – a “dream” – of what you want your company to be like. Having a clear idea of what you are building can help you decide when to say yes and when to say no. Does it go along with my vision? Yes? Then hell yeah let’s do it!

Remember the movie about Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg? There was Mark’s friend who wanted to put ads into FB right from the beginning. They were dead broke, needed to keep going, and it made a lot of sense to get advertisers. The fascinating part is the Zuckerberg said absolutely not. Wouldn’t even consider it. His reason? Because with advertising, Facebook “wouldn’t be cool”. He KNEW the whole thing would be ruined if it wasn’t cool. He stayed true to his vision and eventually figured out how to monetize the business.

So here’s the question for YOU. What kind of business do you really want? What’s the ONE GREAT THING that your product has that makes it special? You can do the same thing that a lot of other companies do – but if you have ONE thing, that “IT factor, you’re golden. Take a minute and fill this out, OK?

Why will someone buy from ME instead of from THEM?

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What’s my ONE great thing? The thing that separates me from the pack?

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I’d LOVE to know your answers so leave them in the comments below and let’s get this discussion going, OK?

As always, thanks for reading,

Jane