Build Your Business Around Solving Engaging Problems

Entrepreneurial focus is immeasurably helped by finding engaging problems - ones to which you and others are irresistibly drawn.

Many people make a mistake by instead picking problems to solve that are of interest only because of the potential financial gain that might result from solutions. Others make a different mistake: picking problems that bore them.

Make either mistake and you'll find yourself losing interest, not paying enough attention, and becoming complacent. You'll soon be doing the minimum to get by rather than driving forward to create the best ... and then outdoing yourself. It's the latter approach that creates the healthiest enterprises.

In fact, if you don't feel more passion for what you are doing than anyone else, you are vulnerable to someone who is more passionate.

Consider great runners. At the end of world-class races, the differences between the winner and the also-rans are often measured in fractions of a second. No matter how talented someone is as a runner, those with less talent, but more passion, can do more training than the most talented person and overcome the talent disadvantage to improve past such a narrow gap.

Keep in mind that in business your own passion goes only so far in creating and delivering superior solutions. You also need to be able to inflame such passion in millions of others who become your devoted stakeholders(including customers, beneficiaries, end users, partners, colleagues, suppliers, distributors, lenders, owners, and the communities you serve).

Otherwise, you will be acting like Don Quixote while he was off with Sancho Panza on imaginary knightly quests in Cervantes' novel, rather than making good time moving along the road to accomplishing your goals.

Passion starts the process.Curiosity opens new doors to accomplishment through continually identifying more of what's possible. After you help open your stakeholders' hearts and minds to the excitement of solving the problem, they need to become as curious as you are.

Inspiration from the heart then binds everyone's actions together in satisfying ways to serve others.Without coming from the heart, solutions may be delivered in inauthentic, uncaring ways that undercut their benefits. I'm often reminded of that when a service person recites a memorized response that they want to be of service, but do so with averted eyes and a grimace that indicate the opposite intent.

Start your search for gaining the passion, curiosity, and heart-felt inspiration you need by examining three themes that have awakened and harnessed such qualities among many of those who have built successful enterprises from scratch: uplift the underdog, help families rear children more successfully, and add resources and knowledge that allow people to help themselves.

This theme works best as a source of inspiration when you have been one of such underdogs and deeply identify with overcoming their challenging circumstances. In terms of inspiration and opportunity, the more underdogs there are that urgently need help, the better!

Here's an example that will probably be familiar to you. Let's say that you are in or have been part of a minority group in a culture and believe that you have had fewer opportunities as a result. After such experiences, helping people like you to succeed better than those who are in the majority can be particularly satisfying.

Ethnic Chinese people outside of China, for instance, have found others' preferences for Chinese food can provide large, financially rewarding opportunities to develop businesses that provide good incomes, employ lots of family members, and attract positive interest from the majority groups in the communities where they live. In such businesses, some entrepreneurs have built substantial enterprises based on providing more authentic access to Chinese cuisine, a passion they shared with other Chinese people.

Poor people, the less educated, and small business owners are examples of other underdogs. Many people write them off, believing that they have few opportunities and even fewer resources. Yet profitable, billion-dollar enterprises have been built from serving the needs of such often-scorned underdogs. Examples include furniture- and appliance-rental companies, proprietary schools providing vocational training, and specialized services such as buying cooperatives.

Some people who seek to serve underdogs have combined public and private purposes to make faster progress. In India, for instance, the Aravind Eye Care System has created the world standard for eliminating causes of blindness both in terms of quality and cost. Consider that the British health-care system regularly flies patients from the UK to India to be treated at Aravind where they receive better and less costly care than what is available in the UK. Aravind's costs are so low that the organization can use the profits from being paid $45 to $331 for cataract surgeries to cover all the costs for treating thousands of indigent patients. The passion, curiosity, and heart-warming aspects of such care are driving Aravind's people forward to achieve still more astonishing levels of excellence and success. For more information about the organization's inspirational beginnings, read pages 265-286 of The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid (Wharton School Publishing, 2005) by C.K. Prahalad.

It's hard to find people who don't care about helping families. Habitat for Humanity International cofounders, Millard and Linda Fuller, felt that every family deserved to live in a decent home in a safe neighborhood. While many people agreed with them, the Fullers did something about their feelings. In the process they helped to create one of the world's largest and fastest growing homebuilders.

Such family-related needs can easily be identified. Many poor families still need homes. Other families need decent schools. Still other families lack clean, low-cost water. In other locales, immunizations are needed. Elsewhere, because information about HIV/AIDS is lacking, millions are likely to experience untimely, unpleasant deaths while leaving behind stunned orphans.

Provide for such basics in higher-quality, lower-cost ways, and the pent-up demand will cause your business to prosper. Consider two examples: Cemex and the Grameen Bank have made important strides by finding ways for poor people to use small amounts of savings to build homes one room at a time, to start profitable small businesses, and to improve subsistence farms. Similar opportunities for profitable growth lie fallow in many other parts of the world that Cemex and the Grameen Bank don't serve.

Many of those who are not prospering up to their potential don't know what they need to know to accomplish more. When you fill such information gaps and coach people about what to do next, you will ignite enormous energies and improvements among those who aren't yet performing up to their potential.

Many people are surprised to learn that venture capital investing is concentrated in just a few industries based in the most developed countries. Such investments have proven to be an enormous source of profits. It's not unusual for long-term portfolio gains to exceed 20 percent a year.

Yet in the majority of industries in most countries, new enterprises can neither borrow nor attract risk-oriented capital at a reasonable cost. Create a way to provide such funds to those who are deserving and capable of succeeding, and you will have established win-win relationships that could build trillions in value and greatly expand employment. All that's missing now is an effective business model for providing such venture-capital investing on a broad scale for small enterprises.

Most entry-level entrepreneurs also need education in basics such as how to engage in entrepreneurship, eliminate stalls, and create and apply 2,000 percent solutions. Consider Bangladesh. The Grameen Bank has found it pays well to provide such educational basics to its borrowers, along with the bank's small, reasonably priced loans.

Those who want to help poorly prepared and indigent entrepreneurs can often find all the missing knowledge and financial resources among successful entrepreneurs in the same communities who already want to help others. Take a look in your community to see what untapped people and resources you can find.