Start Here: Open Sourcing Food+Tech’s Business Plan

Ready, Set,.. Where you do you start?

Every entrepreneur is bursting with at least one good idea. Usually more. When you are bursting with good ideas and feel connected to multiple opportunities its hard to prioritize.

What should you do first?

Danielle has very clear and ambitious goals that she wants to work on in our coaching sessions. The list includes defining the business model for Food+Tech Connect, creating a schedule for building out the business, identifying start-up funding streams, and all the while developing content, more content, and more content. These are all important.. and throughout this series you will see Danielle and I getting deeper into all of these. But none of these are the right place to start.

Before you draw a map or make a plan.. you have to know where you want to end up. Start with the destination. Or, as Simon Sinek says: start at the center.

If you haven’t seen his Ted talk, watch it.

Sinek talks about leadership, and about innovators who accomplish things that defy all assumptions. To succeed, anyone trying to change something as complex and dysfunctional as the food system must defy the odds. Sinek’s bottom line message is that innovators who inspire us act, think, and communicate from the inside of this golden circle out.

By Mosborne01 CC-BY-SA-3.0 or GFDL, via Wikimedia Commons

Rather than defining a product (the What) successful innovators emphasize the WHY and design the HOW (process) and WHAT (product or service) to flow from that starting point. When you work this way, what you do serves as the proof of what you believe. Leaders, innovators and entrepreneurs who do this are able to defy conventional wisdom and markets.

So my first question for Danielle was about mission and vision. What is the essential need that Food + Tech is addressing? Why should Food + Tech exist? Why should we care?

Here is the mission:

Build a media company to inform, analyze and connect innovators using information technology to empower better decision-making throughout the food system.

How about you? Envision the starting point for your work as the center of a target. What inspires you? Why should we care?

Christine Rico is the Founder and President of Waste to Wealth. Christine has worked with organizations and companies in all stages: start-ups, turnarounds, rapid expansion/replication and executive transitions.