You may well be wondering why this website, and indeed my business, is called The Art of Navigation. And let’s face it, if you weren’t earlier you almost certainly are now.

I’m Matt, and I’m the Navigator at The Art of Navigation

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have a ship, and I’m not going to help you learn how to steer your ship if you have one. (Is steer the right word for what you do with a ship? – Ed), but I think it’s a helpful metaphor, and it’s one I use a lot.

Let me take you back in time to a semi-fictional past somewhere around the 1800s when George III was on the throne and ships were the lifeblood of global commerce and the world was beginning to open up.

To become a captain on a ship you had to serve your time as a more junior officer. You would learn from the more experienced sailors, you would see them negotiate difficulties and slowly acquire the skills you needed to take the helm. You would likely fail several times along the way too. But with the old hand to guide you the chances are you would still get where you needed to go.

But even back then as a captain of a ship, where your word was law, you would still need a specialist navigator when things were difficult. A Pilot would come aboard and help you navigate the treacherous waters where you would otherwise come to grief.

(I think we might have taken this metaphor far enough now Matt – Ed)

So whether you are already running a business and feel that you have hit a stumbling block, or you are right at the start of your journey and still in the planning stage, the advice and guidance of someone who has been there before can help you achieve the clarity you need to succeed.

So let’s set my wonderful analogy aside for now, and actually get down to the good stuff.

Once you have made the decision to talk to me, one of the first questions I am going to ask is:

“Why are you doing this business?”

It sounds like the kind of trite question people ask you all the time, in a lot of cases they are trying to catch you out, to prove that you are stupid and they, the person asking the “insightful” question is cleverer than you.

But there genuinely is a lot more to it than that, and it’s a very important subject to discuss.

When we dig down into your answer it will give us a lot of the information we need to be able to steer your business through the stormy seas it will inevitably find itself in.

There’s a lot to unwrap.

What are your personal goals? Are you fed up with the daily grind of work and looking to do something that has a positive impact on the world? Or is it that you simply want to be in charge of your own destiny? Neither one is right or wrong per se, but they may necessitate different approaches.

What problems are you solving with your business? And taking that one a little further, why would anyone decide to give you their money for your solution to that problem?

Is it a problem you yourself have encountered and come up with a solution for? Or is it something you have seen other people experience and it bothered you enough to fix it?

What is it that makes you think now is the right time for this business?

If you’re at the start of the journey have you spent much time researching the idea?

Has someone beaten you to it when it comes to solving the problem you choose? And if so, you're either going to need to delve much deeper into the problem and find something truly valuable, or execute much better than them. Potentially both if you really want to compete with them.

Have you run a business before? Did it fail? If so, do you know why?

There’s nothing wrong with failing, after all I have more than my share of failed business ventures in my past, but the key thing is that you learn from that failure. If you don’t then you can’t possibly hope to prevent exactly the same thing happening again.

But it’s not just failure we need to ask about. How about if it succeeded? Do you know why?

There are a lot of successful people who confuse luck with astute judgement. That’s fine if you only ever intend to run one business, but most entrepreneurs are repeat offenders.

Have you already identified who your customers are going to be? Do you have a new and innovative way to attract them? The world of digital marketing is evolving at a rate of knots (you really can’t leave that metaphor alone can you? – Ed) and what worked five years ago probably won’t work anywhere near as well now.

Assuming you have all those answers nailed down, then we need to look at the actual logistics of this business. Are you in a position to do it? Do you already have all the money you need to get started? Have you even worked out how much money that is? Are you planning on starting small and growing organically, or are you sitting on a big pot of cash that you can spend? Maybe neither of those is true and you need to find some investment? That’s a massive subject that we’ll have to look at in more detail another time.

When it comes down to it, the seemingly simple question “Why are you doing this business?” is actually extremely complex, and taking the time to answer can be a hugely valuable experience.

The sad fact is that many decisions people take while running a business are made in the spur of the moment, and that can cause you to end up with… something, but maybe not something you are completely happy about. Time spent up front deciding what building a business means to you and what you want it to be pays dividends later.

So it wouldn’t do you any harm to sit down with a piece of paper and a pen, or a laptop, and ask yourself that question. If you would like some assistance in framing some more questions and thinking them through, then the Mission Canvas (free download) will help with that.