There’s only one difference between entrepreneurs and the rest of the world. To sum it up in 10 words:
Entrepreneurs don’t just have ideas. They bring them to life.

Next time you wonder what the difference is between you and the next young millionaire (or billionaire), I want you to stop pretending you don’t know the answer. It’s simple: everyone has ideas, but entrepreneurs make their ideas into reality. Now stop reading Reddit, stop watching TV, stop playing games and get out there and build something.

I practice what I preach, and over the past few months I’ve been using a cheap ruled notebook for this very purpose. But this cheap notebook which is on hand wherever I go, so it somehow seems to get used for everything from meeting notes to shopping lists. The simple utility of always carrying a pen and paper has in itself managed to detract from my creative process. Now when I try to get inspired, I have to trawl through page-upon-page of scribblings about other menial tasks and irrelevant notes which seem to end up distracting me from my immediate goals.

This problem was a simple one to solve: get a new notebook which will be used purely for business ideas and innovation, and carry both notebooks around with me.

The notebook I chose for this purpose is the wonderful Moleskine Pocket Ruled Notebook. Considering this is essentially “just” a notebook, I can’t overstate the simple beauty that Moleskines offer. The form factor is stunning. The hefty 192 pages have a wonderful weight to them, as well as being lined and acid-free. The notebook also has a ribbon placeholder, elastic strap to hold the notebook shut, and a back pocket to hold any loose slips of paper.

Buying such a beautiful notebook has helped me out in more ways than one. Now I have a dedicated space for creativity—something I find myself treating as an hallowed, almost sacred object. I wouldn’t dare use it for anything other than the intended purpose. Plus the pages are thread bound, so any temptation to rip them out when I write down something rubbish is dramatically reduced.

I’ve decided to use the Moleskine as a library of business ideas. Whenever I think of a potential business proposition, I turn to the next free double-page in the notebook and write as much or as little as comes to mind. I leave the full double-page dedicated to that single idea, move the ribbon placeholder to the next page, and close the book.

This process is slowly but surely providing me with a beautiful repository of raw potential. Whenever I want some inspiration, I have pages of opportunities to browse. Each time I do, it seems inevitable that I come up with new additions and thoughts which can be noted against each central idea. In time, I expect that this book will be full of such a variety of ideas (some wonderful, some terrible) that starting a side business is almost inevitable!

The point I’m trying to make is a simple one: creativity is important, but so is respect for your ideas. Treating inspiration with reverence beyond a quick scribble will help you to build a bank of great ideas with real potential—and doing so in a book you can be proud to carry will only make the process easier. Invest in ideas today. You’ll thank me in the future.

How do you capture your winning ideas and make sure you don’t forget them forever? Do you have a great process for refining them over time? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

The reactions to snow are mixed. For some, they fear the hassle it brings: disruption to travel, to deliveries, and to daily routine. It brings wet carpets and cold ears; school closures and icy pavements; slippery surfaces and soggy trainers. For others, snow is a blessing. It brings snowballs and sledging; quality time with the kids; days free from the commute and free from the office. And for many, it means a day off. But just because it disrupts routine, why should it destroy productivity?

Snow seems to be the only form of weather which can reliably bring British business to its knees. After the recent snow, absence management organization FirstCare estimated that nearly 11 per cent of the UK workforce stayed at home—the highest figure ever recorded for December. Meanwhile, The Centre for Economics and Business Research estimated that this spell of absenteeism costs us over £1 billion per day. That’s over 26% of Britain’s daily GDP.

The key question for me is not why 11% of the UK workforce stays at home, but why staying at home carries such a high cost to businesses. Why does a little snow (or even a lot of snow) cost us 13% of our daily GDP?

In 2009, it was estimated that 73% of the UK GDP came from the services sector. In today’s world, services means far more than tourism and transport: it also means finance and business services, many of which are essentially virtual. What do I mean by “virtual” services? I’m referring to services which at their core do not directly relate to physical products or the movement of materials. They relate to concepts, to ideas and to important information, yet they do not require a physical backdrop. These are services like accounting, advertising, design, programming and support. To an extent, even telesales, recruitment and many real estate services fall into this category.

ONS statistics show that even in 2000, over 10 million people were employed in virtual sector jobs against a backdrop of over 25 million workers employed within the wider services sector. The virtual sector makes up approximately a third of the UK workforce, yet accounts for closer to half of UK GDP. In today’s climate (both meteorologic and economic), surely the overwhelming majority of virtual sector should be able to work from home and reduce the cost of snowfall?

There are plenty of examples of how companies can function even while staff work from home, and plenty more examples of companies failing to think ahead. I’m going to pick out two.

I’ll start with a software house in Oxford at which many of my friends are employed. When their offices are snowbound or employees are faced with a rather slippery uphill struggle to get to work, they are all provided with myriad sensible ways to work from home. For some, this is as simple as using the same laptop at home as at work. For others, it is centred on good, thorough documentation and a reliance on free, open source software. Sensible email access policies allow users to get set-up from home, and employees are provided with secure access to the company intranet through use of free, multi-platform, open source software like PuTTY. Because the company base so much of their operation on open source software, employees can freely install almost any of the other tools they need to do almost all of their work from home. It’s not ideal, but it’s pragmatic and allows for solid productivity even in the worst conditions. All they need is internet access.

Let’s take a rather less impressive case: Ebuyer, the online electronics superstore. Snow hits, and their deliveries take a hit—something which is perfectly understandable given the location of their offices in East Yorkshire. However, not only do their deliveries struggle, but so do their telephone lines. When the snow came down in early December, their telephone lines were closed for days and email enquiries received very limited responses. This was apparently because their staff could not make it to the support centre. But why did staff need to be in the centre to work?

There are many free or cheap solutions to route telephone calls that do not require a physical dedicated line hooked up to each handset, and indeed virtually every call centre already uses these. There are also plenty of good and cheap solutions for routing calls over IP. As for remote email access: this is just a given in the modern world, and all it takes is for a plan to be in place. Could staff not have been provided in advance with a spare headset and any required documentation to allow them to sign-on and work from home? Perhaps this is impossible with the systems that Ebuyer have in place, but with a little prior planning and good choice of technology it seems very unlikely that the problem could not have been avoided.

The key point is that with a little preparation and a little technology there is almost always a way to allow virtual sector employees to be work from home. There are so many solutions which are already in use for this very purpose—an increasing number of which are already in your IT infrastructure, are freely available, or can be cheaply deployed from the cloud. This is a solved problem from the technological standpoint. Connectivity is not an issue even over great distances, and bandwidth is largely free for consumers, so why not make use of it? Why are we still left to flounder when the snow settles?

This is a call to arms. Management: get prepared, talk to your system administrators in the New Year, and make this happen. It might require a little effort and a little will, but it can be done and will deliver huge savings to your business even in the medium term.

Everyone else: go outside and make the most of the snow while you can. This time next year you might find yourself not skiving and sledging, but working from home. At least you’ll get to skip the commute…