There are two central ingredients to success: Risk and Persistence. I refer to them as “The Catalyst of Success.”

There are thousands and thousands of great entrepreneurial ideas out there. Millions of people have big financial hopes and dreams. There are a lot of people who can talk about their concept or idea with great conviction and flair—or about how they could improve an entire industry with their unique insight and experience.

But for all of the millions of ideas, concepts and plans only a very, very small number of them ever come to fruition.

I’d like to point out two of the most overlooked principles of making any business endeavor a success—in fact these principles apply to any worthwhile endeavor that we might choose to pursue.

The first is RISK and the second is PERSISTENCE. These two principles are absolutely necessary ingredients for success.

When I was a teenager I shaped and glassed my own surfboards. I became very familiar with the process of solidifying fiberglass using a mixture of resin and catalyst. In order to create a bucket full of solution that would cover the entire surfboard, I would add three or four cups of marine resin and just about a tablespoon of catalyst—that tablespoon made all the difference—it was the key ingredient that caused the entire mixture to eventually solidify into a hard fiberglass finish.

In my opinion, Risk and Persistence are like the catalyst that will complete the business plan, or any plan for that matter. It’s what takes a project through to the finish line.

The trouble though, is that many people are either paralyzed by the potential costs of taking risks and choose to avoid something potentially great altogether, OR after taking a risk; lack the patience and tenacity, aka: Persistence that’s required to see something to the finish line. In a sense, they throw in the towel prematurely.

I think you can start to recognize the importance of these two principles.

Do you have some insight and experience about how the principles of Risk and Persistence have affected your life? Or do you have a comment or point in regard to these principles from which the readers can benefit?

Leave a comment and I’ll follow up with a reply as soon as I can…

Several months ago I stumbled across some YouTube marketing presentations by John Moore of Brand Autopsy.

Here’s an interesting presentation called “Jumbo Marketing: Get Bigger by Acting Smaller”.

In this clip, John, formerly a National Director of Marketing for Whole Foods Market, outlines some of his thoughts on “Getting Bigger by Acting Smaller”:

1. Be the best, not the biggest

2. Be passionate about your business

3. Passion attracts passion

4. Treat employees as family

5. Re-define success–measure the impact

Check out these great blogs for more information about this topic:

Small is the new big

How Business Can Get Bigger by Acting Smaller

Bigger Isn’t Always Better

Small Giants

Spending time searching for relevant content online is something I am very familiar with.

How many hours have I wasted fumbling around search engines, targeted sites, and the whole confused mess of content that’s “out there”? I would estimate that I’ve wasted hundreds of hours sorting through this maze…

Apparently Guy Kawasaki and his team over at Nononina, Inc. were having the same problem.

So, like all great entrepreneurs do, Guy and his team went out and created a solution; Alltop.com.

www.alltop.com is a very well organized site that aggregates relevant websites within targeted categories. Naturally, I gravitate to the business section: Alltop Small Business

“Alltop is deceptively simple. The site gathers up the best suggestions from the most active social web users and compiles links into a simple, clean discovery space. For many, Alltop will replace their RSS readers.” Chris Shipley, the chairman of Guidewire Group.

Go take a look and see if you can’t find some areas of interest…you’ll find that the site’s organization, navigation and relevance are as good as it gets online.

Check out these great post for more information about this topic:

New Alltop Blog “Dashboard”

Catch Some Buzz from Alltop

Announcing (Formally) Alltop

Alltop is a One Stop Blog Shop

Instinct: “An inborn pattern of behavior that is characteristic of a specific species…”

Entrepreneurs are a unique species. I wrote last month about some of the basic instincts of entrepreneurs when I introduced The Due Diligence Instinct and The Solution Instinct.

Here are two more to consider…

Youthful Genius Instinct: Most business owners have a story about how they started their first enterprise as a kid; selling lemonade, washing cars, or mowing lawns. My first business was in elementary school when I used to actually “trick-out” standard number two pencils. That’s right, first I would sand off the original yellow paint and then I’d use colored pencils and draw polka-dot, pin striped or Tye-dyed custom designs on the pencils. I’d pawn them off for $1 to my fellow 5th graders. Later, when I was a surf-obsessed teenager, and to my mom’s dismay, I decided to make surfboards in our garage. With my power-sander I would shape foam blanks leaving up to 10 inches of toxic foam layered throughout the garage…then, to make matters worse, I would spray paint designs on the boards and apply a fiberglass coat to the foam blanks. The marine resin coated our garage floor. She shut down my empire after selling only 3 boards. To this day; 20 years later, we still have surfboard paint and resin remnants in that garage.

Entrepreneurial Heritage: Entrepreneurial instincts definitely run in the family. The Trumps, Marriott’s, Romney’s, Murdoch’s and many other great entrepreneurial families pass-along the instincts of entrepreneurship to the next generation. Even among the unknown small business owners of America, the truth of entrepreneurial heritage is evident. My great, great grandfather started the business tradition by rounding-up wild horses and selling them to the US Government. My father operated a small company called Redi-Spuds, a produce company where my brother Greg and I would work together delivering french-fries, salad, and potatoes to restaurants in California. (Greg liked to toughen me up by locking me in the walk-in freezer and see if I could survive for an hour or so. Fun times.)

In 1997 my good friend Anton Visser and I were sales reps for Pyxis, a $500 million division of Cardinal Health. We sold point-of-use pharmaceutical and medical supply systems to small hospitals throughout the US.

While traveling on business trips we would spend nights in hotel rooms brainstorming new business ideas. It wasn’t long before we realized that we had a great idea right under our nose. Why not take what we were already selling, something we were already experts in and find a new, untapped market to expand into?

Within one year we had obtained a worldwide license to market automated point-of-use systems to the industrial supply and manufacturing industry, markets that Pyxis was not interested in approaching. We established DispenseSource (now Nexiant www.nexiant.com ) in 1999 and quickly raised over $10 million from venture capitalists.

Now, 8 years later, Anton is using the entrepreneurial model that has worked well for him once before. He’s finding yet another market for the technology that he knows so well. In 2008 Anton launched v-Supply (www.vsupply.com ) which brings the proven point-of use inventory systems of  Pyxis and Nexiant to the Dental industry.

Look around–What are you doing today in your current job or in your current business that can be introduced to a new market? Is there a software or service that you’ve been impressed with that might be applicable in another market or introduced to a new clientele?

Be aware that most of the great new businesses are not really that new at all–they’re usually spin-offs of something already proven.

Keep that in mind. You’re next great entrepreneurial idea might be closer than you think.