The Power of More Brains

I have been involved with a business startup recently after one of my friends invited me to join him and help the startup take off. Our management team currently consists of three people, with me as the business / soft skills guy and the other two in charge of software development. Honestly, my friend roped me into the startup without telling me what’s his expectations for me and in a way, I feel that my friend really trust me to add value with my own initiative. I believe that his trust is correctly placed, since I’m extremely enthusiastic towards this business idea and have already started working on public relations and sourcing for manpower even though we have not received the funding yet.

In fact, today, I was meeting one of the people who were interested in our Business startup after my presentation at the iJam event held at Temasek Polytechnic. Actually, this is my second meeting with him and obviously I had quite a good experience the first time, which explains why I was eager to meet him today as well. In our first appointment, he was just basically going through with me his background information and asking for more information about our startup. He also proposed how we may be able to work together, although I think the company he’s representing seems to be able to help us more than we can help them.

In the end, we did not really go into an in-depth discussion of any potential partnerships and parted with a ‘keep-in-touch’ basis. Even though we did not officially help each other in any way, I sincerely appreciate the time that he spent with me because simply talking to him opened up my mind to possibilities about what our startup can implement. The amazing thing is that I was not even talking to him about our startup and ideas were already popping up because of the fact that we were looking at virtual worlds and chatting away.

After our meeting, my mind immediately began to race back through all our discussions and think of the potential improvements we can implement, the marketing ideas that we can use but I arrived at another thought. If just casual chatting can bring about so many ideas, imagine what a masterminding session can do for a business. There are many occassions that business owners are apprehensive about sharing their idea for fear that competitors may steal the idea. However, I tend to think that by sharing ideas in mastermind groups, ideas can be refined into blueprints for business success. Anyway, there are not many unique ideas around in the world anymore and it’s often the speed of implementation that makes a difference between someone who profits from his ideas versus someone who don’t.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that if someone tells you his business idea, you go on and spread to everybody. We still need to respect the idea originator and that’s why I have been very careful with my conversations to avoid unintentionally revealing ideas that the originator does not wish to reveal. For example, I do not reveal too much about our startup even if my closest kin ask me because the idea originated from my friend and he personally wishes it to be as discreet as possible. I believe that Trust is very important in today’s context and once you break the trust, it’s almost impossible to mend the gap. Therefore, keeping secrets is a skill in itself.

Back to masterminding… considering that you are the idea originator, instead of keeping it a secret and sleeping on it for the next year or so, you may be interested to share it openly and then work on your idea as fast as you can. After all, a year later, you may be beating yourself up when someone ultimately actualizes your idea and profit from it while you’re sleeping on it. The idea of sharing your ideas is not only to refine the concept, but it also serves to get your engine started and provide an additional motivation for you to come up with something tangible fast.

Some successful businessman I know practice masterminding to some extent and maybe that’s what account for their success. What do you think?