As the world continues to move faster and faster, so should your company’s pipeline of ideas.
The best ideas come from your walks on Sunday mornings, lunches in coffee houses, long showers when you’re busy thinking about how much work you have to do. Clearly, ideas come from the outside – brought to life by environments, interactions, and quiet moments – not from your own head.
So imagine if you have a group of people in one room bouncing ideas off of one another. Each person comes in with their own collection of quiet moments, a unique set of experiences, and their own well-informed hunches about what could be the next big thing.
This is where “venture building” comes in. Venture builders, in essence, build an innovation engine for your business that allows your most promising ideas to go further, faster. They’re a catalyst. They’ll make sure that you never have to sit in a meeting where you feel like nothing’s being accomplished. You’ll leave every strategy session thinking that you’re company actually has the potential to be the next Apple, Uber, or Airbnb of your industry.
Venture Builders Believe in a Founder’s Vision
The thing is, if you’ve been at your job for years, you may not notice that you’ve been wearing blinders. There are customer segments, technologies, and services that you could leverage outside your existing business model, while still maintaining your existing resources and capabilities. You can leave it up to a venture building firm to create value from previously unexplored places that generate a positive ROI for both your business and society.
Venture builders create ventures from scratch – may this be a new brand, product, project, team, sales strategy, revenue stream, or business to target untapped opportunities in your market. Their job isn’t always about building a separate entity.
If anything, it’s their responsibility to move mountains to make your idea, no matter how grand or minuscule, become a full-fledged venture that takes the world by storm.
Venture builders, by their very nature, aren’t passive investors; they’re active participants in your growth journey, fully invested in your vision. They don’t just find ways to finance your idea. They offer a comprehensive framework of support (e.g., technological expertise, mentorship, operational guidance) that is often needed to bring your dream to fruition.
They place their bets on not just the idea, but the person behind it.
The symbiotic relationship between venture builders and founder is reminiscent of the bond between a co-founder and the original founder. They share a common goal, work together to tackle challenges, and celebrate joint successes.
When you partner with a venture builder, you’re not just gaining a source of funds. You’re getting a collaborator. You’re getting a partner who believes in your vision wholeheartedly and is willing to get their hands dirty to make it happen.
Why Venture Building Is the Best Path to Innovation
As mentioned, a venture builder is a startup that builds new products, services, business models, and sometimes even a completely new startup from the ground up. You could also make the term synonymous with “Embiggen Group” – we won’t mind.
Businesses that operate with venture partners have a sharp competitive advantage: They have the network, ecosystem, and expertise that it takes to make an idea-drawn-on-paper into a venture that sticks.
While we do acknowledge that innovation is associated with high-risk ventures, this begs the question – why even bother to do it at all?
1) Get All the Support You Need From Day One
The golden rule of business is that you need to build a strong foundation if you want to set yourself up for success. You can go about this process in different ways, although we recommend doing these simultaneously:
- Tap into your support network: In the entrepreneurial world, the adage “Your network is your net worth” often rings true. You need access to a network of contacts that can provide support, guidance, and opportunities.
- Form partnerships and associate with well-known brands: A venture building firm connects you with other businesses that complement your own. With a vast ecosystem at your fingertips, you can stay leagues ahead of your competitors by shortening time-to-market.
- Secure the right talent: When you find the right people for your dream team, you can rest assured that your venture stays at the apex of innovation.
Here at Embiggen Group, we take a 4-phase approach to venture building: discover, develop, build, and scale.
As your co-founder, we’re not about wresting control from you; rather, we want to work hand-in-hand with you from the very first day. After all, no one wants to go through a venture journey all alone.
2) Overcome Financial Inertia
It’s a given that securing funding is a big hurdle that comes with growing a startup. In fact, one of the most common misconceptions is that funding rounds have a substantial investment pool; however, this couldn’t be further from the truth.
It’s not easy for investors to take a chance on a venture that hasn’t proven its weight in the real world. While a startup founder can go knocking on the door of angel investors and venture capital firms, chances for approval are slim, especially if the value proposition doesn’t clearly articulate its path to profitability. Venture builders can make this process much easier and seamless.
As for established corporations, if you want to turn an idea into a sustainable and successful venture, you probably already have the resources and funding. This puts you a few steps ahead of startups that need access to substantial capital. What you need now is the expertise to hit the ground running.
Enter the venture building partnership. What an outsourced venture building firm brings to the table is an established network and team of experts that can create new value for your company. They’ll stimulate new growth faster and more efficiently than if you did it all alone.
3) Exploit the Advantages That Come with Being a Small, Fast Fish
As Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, puts it, “In the new world, it is not the big fish that eats the small fish, it’s the fast fish that eats the slow fish.”
The teams behind small ventures, unencumbered by legacy systems and ingrained corporate culture, have the appetite for risk. They’re hungry. They have this insatiable thirst for success, unlike large corporations that may move at a slower pace and experience more predictable growth.
When you partner with a venture building firm, you can look at problems with a new set of eyes, which can result in disruptive solutions. Venture builders can give you that fresh perspective on how you can outshine, outplay, and outmaneuver incumbent players in your industry.
Keep in mind that venture building as an innovation strategy is suitable for any business, regardless of size and industry. As long as you have good profit margins, you can start your own venture building journey that instigates an explosive wave of growth.
Those margins become room for possible vertical and adjacent ventures that for one, provide another revenue stream, and two, give you leeway for greater agility in a world that moves at breakneck speed.
Venture Building: From Theory to Practice
Look at Instagram, for example. It began as a location-based social network called Burbn, but quickly pivoted to a photo-sharing app when the company recognized a gap in the market. This strategic shift allowed Instagram to grow rapidly and eventually be acquired by Facebook for $1 billion.
Then we have Tesla which revolutionized the automotive industry with its electric vehicles. It was able to force established automakers to evaluate their approach to sustainable transportation.
We can also look at how Airbnb challenged the traditional hotel industry. By recognizing the potential of a deceptively simple idea, which is people renting out their homes as short-term accommodations, the company was able to create a novel solution to an already existing problem.
From Twitter, GCash, Lazada, Food Panda, Grab, Zalora – the list goes on.
Embiggen Group’s Team Becomes Your Team
Innovation isn’t simply about going from zero to one hundred. It’s about leveraging your existing assets, resources, and capabilities to create new value that allows your business to stay on the cutting edge.
Venture building is another strategy you could add to your innovation playbook. Partnering with a venture builder, like Embiggen Group, is not merely a source of ideas. You’ll get a dedicated team that believes in your vision, is willing to work alongside you, and is ready to support you. Your success becomes our shared success. Learn how your business can go from being a market player to a market leader today.