Corona has made it crystal clear just how important it is to our business to keep adding revenue streams.
It’s easy to feel like you’ve got it all figured out when business is running smoothly in a booming economy. It’s when the storm hits – like the corona-crisis – your assumptions and strategies really gets tested.
We’ve always believed we would be better off in a storm if we had multiple ships in the sea instead of depending on a single, large ferry. Luckily, we work in a field where that is possible and so far, the strategy has proven right for us.
When we founded Lolle & Nielsen Inventions a decade ago, our big bet was SmartMover. But simultaneously, we initiated a bunch of other projects.
Some of them – including SmartMover – proved to be winners which helped our company take off. Others were dead ends.
To this day, this is still how we run our company. We keep initiating new projects while continuing development of the existing ones.
This way, we always have multiple project at different stages. Some provide increasing revenue. Some will never be profitable. But by diversifying into a wide range of project we always have a new project to take over if one fails.
Especially in the beginning, the diversity was fueled by opportunism: As a new inventing company we had to jump at every opportunity.
Today, we do however still spend a lot of time on cultivating new opportunities to jump at. We continuously work on early-stage projects by contacting universities, speaking with the building industry about their current problems and researching relevant political and societal agendas.
It might not be right for all business to seek new ventures in such an opportunistic way as we do with inventions. But no matter the business, we believe it’s always better to have multiple sources of possible income instead of depending on just one.