As my business partner and I were talking through our plans for how to build the community of our adventure travel company, we discussed the flywheel effect. A flywheel takes significantly more energy to get started in the beginning, but once it’s moving the inertia of what you’ve been doing previously takes over and the device is nearly self-propelling. It needs a push here and there to keep it going, but only in short spurts and not a constant push as was needed in the beginning stages.
Businesses can learn a lot from this idea, especially start-ups. There is often a great deal of work up front, but once the idea (a good one) begins to spread, it’s like wild fire and can’t be stopped!
With Epic Day we are looking to build a community around our website and it in the beginning it’s going to be building that community, reaching out and encouraging that crowd participation. However, if we can encourage it the right way, that crowd participation will take on a life of it’s own and the wheel will be self-propelling. Our jobs will be minimal and we can focus our efforts in other areas to continue to grow the business. The trick then becomes to not just “maintain” the community but to continually grow it while keeping that inertia.
The flywheel effect needs to be in place for many of our businesses. In sales based companies it comes through great sales people gaining referrals and return customers, providing “endless” amounts of leads for the company and themselves. In innovative companies it comes through encouraging the creatives to always be testing with little reprimands for their experimentation. Once the culture is set and the precedents have been laid, your innovators can do what they best.
How is the flywheel effect in place in your business?
