I was at a meeting the other day when one member of the audience came up to chat to me after I had given my presentation. ‘I agree with what you told us,’ she said, ‘but it only applies to some people. After all in my business there’s nothing I can turn into an ebook.’ Within a minute of chatting to me she had developed two ideas for ebooks.
Now, I’m not saying I’m some kind of miracle worker. However, often I discover that many people who run their own business can’t see the wood for the trees. They are so tied up in delivering solutions to their existing customers, they can’t see what else might be possible. As an example, I was talking to a chap from the Midlands the other day who runs a plastic mouldings company. He said to me that my ideas for ebooks only work in the service industry and they they couldn’t possibly work within his sector.
A few minutes later we had developed an idea for an ebook which he is now going off to get written. As a search term, “plastic mouldings” gets around 45 searches a day in the UK. At the moment his web site gets almost none of those searches; instead his...