Things Entrepreneurs Don't Say #1: "I don't want someone to steal my idea."

On SURE Application Day two Saturdays ago, nearly 500 people vied for a spot in the SURE Program to grow their small business. At the end of the day, one gentleman paid me an enormous compliment:

"I've been taking business education programs online, in schools, and at conferences as I grew my restaurants all over the Southwest for thirty-plus years, and I've never heard it put as plainly—and it's never been as funny—as you made it here!"

I don't know if I can make it funny in a typed LinkedIn post, but I do want to share a taste of what was said that day

Ask any business owner—the idea is NOT the hard part. The great tragedy in working with current and aspiring entrepreneurs is meeting someone who has the will and ability to run a business and has been wanting to launch for years, even decades, but has kept their idea to themselves. Then, when they reveal it, it's either not good, or there are already two dozen people doing it in their own zip code! Their dream is crushed because they had this irrational fear the whole time.

The problem is that starting a business takes a lot of work, time, and money. Going from consumer to entrepreneur is like going from audience to artist, or child to parent: it is a life experience barrier that it is almost impossible to communicate across. Before you start a business, all you can think about is how important the idea is.

Consider an artist pondering their first piece of art. Ask any working artist—the hard part isn't the idea, it's getting anyone to care at all once you actually put it out. Similar to someone thinking about having kids, wondering about decisions they make will years from now: whether their kid will get a phone, whether they will home-school, what to do about college. Ask any parent, the hard part is figuring out how to stay sane in the first two years.

Ideas are nearly useless. I could walk into any college classroom right now with a stack of blank paper and walk out with 1,000 ideas. It's validated ideas that are valuable. To validate an idea, you must work at it, research it, and, most importantly, talk to real people about it.

Almost everyone worries at first, "what if someone wants to steal my idea?" The truth is, anyone who wants to steal your idea will also have to do all that hard work. They'll need to validate the idea and talk to people. The only exceptions to this are (1) direct competitors and (2) those with enough money to hire others to do the validation for them.

Direct competitors will try to muscle in and steal your customers, undercutting your prices. The wealthy might just take the idea, claim it was their idea first, and tie you up in court. If you're the type of person who wants to "protect their idea," you might feel this vindicates your caution more than ever. But, what you might not know is that both of these people would almost always much rather just buy you out because it is less risky for them.

It may seem counterintuitive, but most up-and-running businesses grow by buying other businesses and their existing customer bases, not finding new customers. And most wealthy people who "get into business" don't start businesses, they buy existing, successful ones. So your best insurance against making sure a direct competitor or a wealthy person doesn't start your business first is to start it before they can.

At the end of the day, if you have an idea, the best strategy is to (1) Google it, (2) talk about it, and (3) see if someone would pay for it. Finding out if your "business idea" already exists, what people would think, and if someone might pay is worth more than decades of secret daydreams. In almost every scenario, imagining someone might steal your idea only hurts you.

I found a meme online that said "Ideas are worthless without execution" but I don't think that's necessarily true or captures it so I took some liberties and edited with myself—you will see my skills don't necessarily lie in design but in getting points across below: "Business ideas are worthless without validation."

Feel free to download and keep this picture as a reminder! If anyone wants to charitably update this poster and donate it to me and the SURE Program, please mention this LinkedIn post and email it to SURE at UH dot EDU.