How often have you wished that you could make your passion your profession too? Pooja Bagri, global executive and leader coach, shared some tips to help you do just that at Futurebound, a three-day pan-India youth conference organised by the AIESEC (Association Internationale des Étudiantsen Sciences Économiques et Commerciales) chapter. The session titled ‘How to monetise your passion?’ was part of India’s biggest virtual youth conference mentored by Infosys.
“A dream without hard work is just an idea. Invest your time in your growth, spend hours on your passion and read real stories of real people who walked the path,” was Bagri’s advice to the students.
Here are excerpts from the session:
Stage 1: Identify your passion
Firstly, before thinking about monetising, you should understand what you are phenomenal at and what is a passion. The Japanese concept of Ikigai is helpful in this context. Ikigai is defined as your motivating force. The force that gives you a sense of purpose and a reason for being. If you understand and anchor this one question ‘why’ you love what you love doing, your ‘how’ and your ‘what’ will follow much more easily.
Stage 2: Translating your idea into a business
To translate your passion into a business, you first need to understand the business essentials that include researching what exists in the market and what the market lacks; understanding the gap you can fill and the problem you are trying to solve; and how you can differentiate yourself from the rest. These can help you crack the USP and business plans accordingly. It is also important to capture the viewpoint of all stakeholders and that includes the market, investors and producers and know their approaches too.
Stage 3: Understanding your Ideal Client
If you try to solve a problem for everyone, you end up solving nothing for no one. While making the business plan and fixing strategies, it is essential to understand the clients by considering their current habits, identifying their needs by knowing what they are looking for and analysing their buying decisions and working accordingly. It is important to identify the challenges your clients face and help them with your idea. Also, you have to find your niche because everyone out there is not your client.
Stage 4: Go to Market
Once you are ready with your business plan and have figured out who your client is, the next step is the Go to Market (GTM) strategy. You have to understand where your product fits in and how you are adding value to somebody else --- that should be your first thought and not how you’re going to make money. Today everybody is looking for value. If your thought process is about adding value, you can automatically make money out of it, thus determining the pricing strategy, revenue target, branding and lead generation.
Stage 5: Raising funds
To run a business, one needs money and there are quite a few sources of funds like bootstrapping, loans or lines of credit, angel investors, venture capital, crowdfunding and start-up accelerators. Finding the right investor is also important because for every opportunity there is an investor. Investors are always looking for the right opportunity to invest in and young budding entrepreneurs are also looking for investors. It is just about bridging the gap between the right opportunity and the right investor.
Stage 6: Action Steps
Failure doesn’t mean that you did not succeed. Failure just means you have a couple of steps more to go till you succeed. You should promise to continue climbing even if you can’t see where success is going to hit you. There are a dozen stories where people have failed but made it. It is important to start working on the action step you are committing. You should promise not to quit your dreams. There are only two ways to live life, either you be the author of your own story or you let someone else write the chapter of your book. Reflection is what leads to action and hence don’t fear asking your mentors.
