This post is to remind you of the importance of moving forward towards creating a viable business model, so you don’t run out of steam before you build something financially sustainable.

I’m conscious that a lot of our blog content is focused on helping people understand what they are creating in the early stages of the idea and business development. Which means there’s a lot of exploration around what you want to create as a founder, who your potential customers are, what problems they have, and what the underlying value is that you’re creating. It’s the ‘figuring out’ stage.

This is important in the beginning so that you can find the best place to create a business from, one that aligns with what you’re passionate about and what the world needs and will pay for.

But it’s also important that you shift out of this exploration state and into execution mode. Execution mode feels a lot different and this evolution can be hard for some founders. Especially ‘social entrepreneurs’. Instead of getting rewarded by the feeling of figuring things out for yourself, you get rewarded for getting tasks done and reaping the rewards from it. The reward being revenue, which is necessary for you to build a sustainable business.

You evolve from being focused on vision, mission and purpose, and into being focused on product, revenue, strategy, systems, processes.

Once you have a product and a way of getting customers, don’t keep trying to reinvent the wheel. Focus on identifying all of the key components of your business, the processes that are required for them to function well and systemising them so they can be repeated by anyone.

Once you’ve built a sustainable revenue model, you’ll free up time and generate capital to invest in new and innovative products or projects.