For entrepreneurs, the biggest part of the job title is creating solutions. How well an entrepreneur understand the art of creating solutions determine how far they will make it and succeed in this game. No matter if the task at hand is software development, business development, marketing campaign, politics, fundraising or professional and personal growth, knowing the art of creating solutions separate real cats from the lightweights.
In this article, we want to show the brothas and sistas how to create applied solutions to their hustle. One of the things here in the African-American community I personally want the young cats to peep is how these fake so-called Black leaders do not focus on creating solutions but running their mouth. The 3rd Strategic Institute and Dream and Hustle, we focus on solutions and that is what we always bring to the table and that's why cats respect me and my crew more than these fake Black leaders and fake Black business magazines out there.
Creating a solution is a phase in the development process after you decide what you want to do and before you begin any real work on your hustle. It is the most critical part of your hustle and your hustle will either succeed or fail based on how well you define the solution approach. We were not taught solution skill in the inner city public schools because educators obviously did not want us creating solutions in America and just wanted us to take standardized tests.
During the solution phase, the goal is to establish entities and their interaction in the hustle, set the goal and the workflow and create the detailed solution to the workflow process to meet the goal. After reading this article, you will clearly understand why we go hard on these fake Black technology clowns pretending they doing something special because me and my crew can instantly tell how well the solution was defined and the majority of Black tech cats do not understand how to create well thought-out solutions but want the fame and glory through fronting.
Anyway, let's discuss how to do solutions so brothas and sistas can learn to create real stuff and make real stuff happen in this world.
Identify the Entities
An entity is your nouns that could be a person, place or thing. In your hustle as you describe the features and write them down, you have to learn how to identify the entities in your statements and pull them out to be worked against.
For example, for the virtual event I'm planning, the entities are the vendor, the attendee, the location and the mobile device. For economic empowerment in the hood, the entities are the entrepreneurs, the commercial zone, the customer, the employees, the thugs, the politicians, the social activists, the police and the media and more. As you see, the bigger the project the more entities have to be clearly defined.
Once you write down the entities, for each entity, you have to define the attributes of them in your words of what they want or their interest in the hustle. For example, the vendor in the virtual event want attendees to follow though and buy something from them. The vendors are micro-enterprises meaning they are probably a one-person or two-person business operation who may be side-hustling while working a full-time job. The more we create attributes, the more we understand all the things involved in the hustle and bring them to the solution table.
Define the Interactions of the Entities
Once you define all of the entities in your hustle, the next step is to determine how they will interact with one another. Let's go to the mobile payment business model where you have a payer who send the payment and the receiver who receive the payment. You focus on using action statements around the payer and the receiver to define the interaction.
Payer downloads mobile app from app store to mobile phone
Payer use account registration process to create a new mobile payment account
Payer verify their account through SMS verification
Payer add funds to the mobile payment account using bank transfer
By using action phrases, what you are basically looking at is the instruction manual for end users that can be created off these statements. Have a section called Setting Up a Mobile Payment Account and subsections such as downloading the app, register a new account, verify account, adding funds to the account and a paragraph for each section.
Define the Goal
Once the entities have been defined and how the entities interact with other entities in the hustle, it becomes more straightforward to create the solution. Now we focus on setting the goals which is what we trying to accomplish in the hustle. In business, the goal is to make money. The way you make money is to get the customer to enter a transaction with the business using exchange of money for goods and services. So the goals should be to have goods to exchange for money and facilitate the customer to make the transaction as efficiently as possible.
Think about Wal-Mart or McDonald's for a minute – when all is said and done you are at the register and making a transaction and their whole business revolves around that. You go load up your Wal-Mart and do what – you go to checkout and swipe your card or pay with cash. You go to McDonald's and that person taking your order is standing over a cash register to take payment. You should not be surprise how many people claim they are about business but have zero strategy to facilitate efficient and scalable transaction.
Remember with the virtual event, the goal is to get attendees to shop and be aware of vendors. The goal of economic empowerment in the hood is to create a place for brothas and sistas to have an area they can identify as their homeland that embrace who they are and their culture in the open as Black Americans. So the goals is to create sustainable economy through job creation, business development, parks and recreational development, good housing options and safe and positive social vibe.
We can discuss personal life like my dating strategies where my goal here in Atlanta is to find a woman with the body of a stripper and the brain of a college grad. I have to define me and what I want, define her and what she want and spots where she dwell at like around these professional athletes and celebrity circles and the Atlanta Mayor office. So I create goals of showing up at these black tie social events around high society Atlanta eating cheese crackers and drinking wine talking about my sports car and my cufflinks to befriend that chick to meet my defined goal.
Remember that you should not set goals until you understand every entity that is involved and how those entities interact with each other. You have to get an understanding of all the things involves so you can set realistic expectations for your goals.
Define the Workflow
To meet the goals, a workflow which are a series of steps to take has to be defined. For example, for the virtual event, the virtual attendee has to use transportation to the geofenced area, use their mobile device to access the virtual event and scroll for vendors. That is a defined workflow and what I have to create as a result is instructions on directions to the geofenced area by public transportation or by car, provide requirements on the type of mobile device to access the geofenced web site and make the web site easy to navigate to the virtual booths setup by the vendors.
Create a diagram with the goal at the end and then create ways the goal can be met. Do not be afraid to use the "ends justify the means" approach as well as the safe approach and analyze the best approach from all of your workflows. This allow you to see not only how you can reach your goals in many ways but how other cats can come at you and compete with you and be able to read their game.
Create Solution from Workflow
Once you have your workflows defined, then you create the solution to your hustle. You start creating a plan how to operate the workflows in details. The more detail you provide, the more solid your solid your solution will become. The key to creating a successful detail workflow is to understand all of the risks and opportunities.
For example in the transaction process, you can have a customer with a stolen credit card trying to do business with you – how do you handle that? Those are the risks that need to be defined in your workflow. In the virtual event project we are working on, we identified the risk of mobile device thieves who like to snatch devices out of people hands and run. As a result, we will have notifications and messages about staying safe from these risks.
Then you can find opportunities in your workflow and this happens a lot and inspire you more after knowing everything. For example, I thought about printing up fliers to help promote the event but realize the opportunity of just buying a cheap $100 tablet that I will give the person I hired for free after they show QR codes to be scanned by attendees to visit the site and assist with technology questions on the site of the virtual event.
Let me say it again and why cats get mad when I call them out – once you understand and master the art of creating solutions, you can easily tell if your competition or other cats are creating solid solutions or not. You can easily tell the difference between a half-baked idea versus a well thought-out solution to the hustle. Then you learn something else as an African-American and how these fake Black leaders are not creating solutions or even taking the steps to make solutions but just keep running their mouth.
Think about how much progress our community would have made if brothas and sistas sat down and went through the real process to creating a solution to issues and problems. Notice the other Black media like Black Enterprise magazine will never touch an article like this, telling you brothas and sistas how to create solutions yet these cornballs at Black Enterprise want to pretend they better than Dream and Hustle. See, now you know who is about solutions and about it this game and the cats who are just running their mouth.
Next Steps
After we define the solutions, the next steps are planning, prototyping, development, testing and release. But to be honest, all of that is easy once you have a well-defined solution. You know all the entities involved and how each entity play their role. You know the goals you want to set and create workflows to meet those goals. Then you create solution approaches to those workflows with risks and opportunities well-defined. That is how brothas and sistas create well-rounded solutions and solid hustles.
This is how me and my crew gets down with our solution and why I can explain our hustles in detail and we have thought it out thoroughly. Cats used to come to Dream and Hustle acting like they smarter than us and know something then get mad when we let them know we already covered all based and did our homework. I wished more brothas and sistas get the discipline to learn the art of creating solutions and I hope this article reached someone to start doing their hustle the right way.
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