Blog post 22 Invent

INSIGHT 18 | PURPOSE MATTERS

Inspiration can carry you a long way.

Not necessarily in the right direction.

When you’re grounded in purpose, that anchor prevents you drifting.

In my case, the tide had other ideas.

in¹⁸ | Purpose Matters

Inspiration without purpose... Swept along without direction 

I’ve just realised we didn’t celebrate the win back in in⁹.

Now that’s the equivalent of holding in all your emotions as you calmly await the deliberations of VAR before letting rip and punching the air in pure delight. Just so you don’t look foolish when they disallow that perfectly good goal your new striker buried in the top corner, on the stroke of full time.

Circling (or should I say cycling) back to BiKLOX, I owe you an explanation on how this business came to be wound up.

Being announced as the winner, with no acceptance speech penned in anticipation, I was… well, somewhat speechless. Whilst a clear winner I was awarded £35,000 with the balance of the prize money being distributed to second place to help commercialise a more traditional solution. It was in that moment that I realised I’d broken through a barrier, but the judges were not prepared to back my idea to the full extent of the prize pot.

Nonetheless I was delighted and with a clear intent on saving bikes from being snatched off the streets, I took the idea from award winning working prototype to launch within 4 months of that memorable evening in Bethnal Green, London.

There were many challenges as with any venture, nothing is risk free. Aside from the frustration around the brand pronunciation the biggest one was the need to expand the range to cater for all variants of pedal geometry. After all it was to be expected that the product would evolve the more the user needs came into clear view.

Now we had a funding gap… how sorely was that extra £15,000 prize money missed, now the product offering had begun to mature.

And that original projection of muted confidence came back to bite. I either needed to commit 100% and invest to take on established manufacturers, the big boys, or let go.

But more than that it boiled down to the simple fact that the idea was borne from circumstance, emboldened by passion and the skill set to enact. It was never founded in clarity of purpose because it was simply a competition, a challenge, a puzzle to solve.

As a result, the subsequent journey was never truly planned. It simply unfolded on the back of an inventive solution. The product concept more than met the brief but lacked the structure of a business roadmap, a clear plan and defined path. That absence of solidity proved instrumental in my decision to bank the learning and move on.

Today, I’m carving my own path, not a side hustle, but a full-time, earn-a-living, pay-the-bills type of business. That deposit of knowledge and experience feels as raw and relevant as it did the day I locked it away in the vault of life experience.

So, I’ve been back to the bank, made a withdrawal on the lessons learnt, and I’m putting them to good use.

Remember, whatever your idea, clarity of purpose will guide you… your Sherpa on the climb to fulfil your ambition.