When you start a new small business, you have to make a choice about your basic strategy. The safe route is to find something that lots of people are already doing successfully and to do that too exactly the same way. If you choose this route, you don't necessarily have to be innovative but you do have to be well-organized, reliable and good at running an organization. You will probably also need more capital and your chances to make it really big will be limited because so many people are in that business already. On the other hand, your risk is lower. You will have many businesses to choose from and your problem will be to make the correct choice for yourself based on what you like to do, what you do well, where you can locate and how much you are willing to invest. Franchises are a good example of this type of business. Your success depends of doing the same things as everyone else except better.
The other route to take is to do something that has not been tried before. Here, your problem is not your choice among many possibilities but to come up with even one thing that is going to work. This route is inherently more risky but, if you have done your planning, your business modeling and your projections and you are right, the payoff can be huge. The business which you choose can be new in the sense that it produces something new but it can also produce something in a completely new and better way or it can sell an existing product to people who have not been offered this product before. In every case, your success depends on doing something new and different. If your idea was right, you don't even have to do it all that well.
To recognize these two choices for a small business is important because some people will say to themselves that they will play it safe and choose an existing kind of business but they will do it slightly differently. Now the chance of failure has gone way up since they have neither the benefit of identifying with an existing, successful business nor the benefit of being in a field with no competition. In addition, when there are lots of people established in a field, chances are that the existing business model is really the best one. Minor changes will have been tried and abandoned. Don't forget that the successful businesses in a particular field are already the survivors, run by people who have been proven to be good at what they do.
