Are you planning to launch a business, a new product, or a book in 2025?
That’s not surprising. Small-business optimism has reached a six‑year high, according to the NFIB Small Business Optimism Index, which saw a six‑point change in respondents who think “now is a good time to expand” from December to January.
But you may not know where to begin when it comes to turning your idea into reality. According to brand strategist and entrepreneur Jen Kem, pulling off a successful launch is all about building a team with the right balance of energy and skills.
In her just‑launched book “Unicorn Team: The Nine Leadership Types You Need to Launch Your Big Ideas With Speed and Success” (Random House), Kem, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, details how to orchestrate a successful rollout. She taps her experience as part of a team that innovated streaming video technology and as a member of the leadership teams of Oprah Winfrey Network, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and Oracle. “It’s a playbook for innovating anything,” she says.
I spoke recently with Kem about how solopreneurs and owners of other small, lean businesses can apply the ideas in her book.
Put your idea through the right filters. If you have a new idea—whether it’s for a product or a book—Kem uses a specific framework for determining “Is my idea worth bringing to the world?” It’s based on the concepts visualize, strategize and mobilize.
If, for instance, you want to write a book, you first need to visualize, or picture, what the final product will look like. She recommends asking yourself another question: “Can you state what that future looks like and why that matters?”
Once you’ve established that the vision fits into the future you see for yourself and will help people in the way you aspire, you will need to strategize how to realize the goal, she says. It is about asking yourself, “What do I do every 100 days?” She recommends working in “100‑Day Sprints,” because they’re goal‑based and focused, compared to a five‑year vision, “which requires you to do a lot of 100‑Day Sprints to get there.”
“100 days gives you enough grit and data to then help you pivot the strategy to meet your five‑year vision,” she says.
Then it’s time to mobilize. Mobilizing is making daily progress to realize your strategy. That entails asking, “What are the tiny action steps inside of those 100 days to actually move the idea forward?”
Understand your “leadership energy.” Kem identifies nine types of leaders, based on their energetic style, and has created a diagnostic similar to personality assessment tests. Someone who leads with their vision but is strong in strategy would be a “visionizing strategizer,” for instance. The basic diagnostic is “What makes you push through when things get hard?”
Another way to look at this is “What makes you self‑motivated to do this thing?” she says. For instance, Tony Robbins, a visualizer, works with strategizer Dean Graziosi, co‑founder of Mastermind.com, and his certified results coaches act as the mobilizers on the team.
Build your “unicorn team.” It is important to find team members who complement your energy because you will be the main driver of the innovation. The people on this team are the “unicorns” she mentions in the title. Once you have identified what energy you lead with, you can ask yourself “What are the other types of unicorns I need to get this done?” she says.
“A lot of times we say, ‘Oh, I should get a VA and they should do my calendar, my social media posts and my whatever,’” she says.
Kem recommends a different approach, in which entrepreneurs first identify what type of person they need on the team, based on energy and skill set. “Visualizers are motivated by their ideas, strategizers are motivated by results, and mobilizers are motivated by accomplishment—and accomplishment meaning, close the loop, finish the job, follow through,” she says.
To bring a project to completion, the visionary will generally need both mobilizers and strategizers, she says. “What we need most of the time are people who have high M—mobilization energy,” she says. “They love details; they love closing the loop.”
But mobilizing without strategy doesn’t work. “The strategizer role is the translator,” she says. “The visualizer has all of these big ideas, and the mobilizers just want to get things done. They want to do their job, finish it and close their computer at the end of the day.”
Set aside “failure money.” If you believe in a big idea, you may need to invest money that you don’t get back to “fail faster” and learn from it, according to Kem. It’s important to budget some money to cover this, as she sees it. She recommends putting 5 to 10 percent of the money you’ve budgeted for the launch into a “fail money” account.
“Five percent of my marketing budget is ‘fail money,'” says Kem. “We can fail up to that amount and no one is going to get ‘in trouble’ because we’ve done the work.”
“If you already put aside the amount of money you’re willing to lose, and you tell your team they will not be penalized if you lose this money because you know as a team what you’re trying to accomplish, it motivates the team more to take more risks with you,” she adds.
Accept that the launch team may be temporary. The team you work with for a launch may not be the one you work with for everything you do. “You have to be okay with the fact people may not last forever,” says Kem. Ultimately, building a launch team is about the launch, and once you’re successful with one, you may be eager to move onto the next one.
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