Peter Jones - Business Mentor

I’m always looking for ideas from people who have achived great things with their cpmpanies and Peter Jones from TVs Dragon’s Den certianly fits that catagory. He has a great website and business forum that I would highly reccomend at www.peterjones.tv which has some great articles.  He acts as a mentoring figure to many and has some great ideas on marketing and many others.    I have reproduced an article from his website here on the importance of imagination

Aged 12, I imagined what it would be like to run a tennis academy. When I was 16, my imagination ran riot when I gained experience from another coach during the summer holidays. It was enough to spur me into completing the Lawn Tennis Association’s coaching exams, which enabled me to set up my own academy. I made the most of my two interests: sport and economics. I followed my imagination.

Free thinking is vital in business. Daydreaming is good. Ideas are the seedlings of reality which need to be nurtured into real, living, breathing enterprises.

Being an entrepreneur means harnessing the power of your imagination constantly. Imagination has no boundaries or constraints. Great ideas are central to you and your business. Let your imagination breathe.

Ideas are everywhere. Use a variety of stimuli to help you capture them. Draw parallels from one object or idea to help you think through the workings of another idea. In doing so, you can turn an imaginative idea into a fully fledged fleshed out business.

Equally, ideas harvested by the imagination must be plausible, rather than total fantasy; believeable, rather than unlikely. For a dream to become reality, it must be real enough to believe in. So let the imagination run freely, without constraint, but still have viability in mind.

As the idea blossoms into a plausible business idea, it’s time to stop and stand back.

Entrepreneurs know when to stand back and review their ideas objectively. It’s vital to appraise ideas honestly. A common mistake is to believe there are no flaws in an idea whatsoever, which often means missing obvious problematic areas. There will be links in the chain to fix and potential problems to smooth over.

A good entrepreneur knows this, seeks out the missing pieces and focuses on the weaknesses of the idea as well as the strengths before fine tuning the idea and proceeding.