Take a sea creature about the length of a car that’s partial to eating micro aquatic life, run over it with a steam roller (found at any good equipment hire store) and let it loose in any coral lagoon (preferably in the Indian Ocean).

Pretty much what you’ll end up with here is a very hungry, exceptionally motivated and astoundingly efficient eating machine called a manta ray. These strange looking creators about the size of the island in my kitchen, with a mouth bigger than Janet Street Porter (need to be English for this one) are the planets best filtering systems – think a vacuum cleaner with fins. The volume of water based material they get through just to stave off the munchies is quite amazing. Well, that’s just where i am at the moment with my exploits to find my next great business. The amount of possibilities out there can be pretty over whelming so the art is to know how to filter. There’s 3 essential ways that i’m looking at the landscape with regard to making my choice of start up business:

1. Start my own thing from scratch (my idea, my team etc).

2. Find someone who has already created a product but hasnt yet got it out the door and starting selling it.

3. Join a business with an established product and team (still an early stage business but it’s up and running)

Each of these has a different risk reward profile and different life style implications but it’s an interesting start point.

Today, i attempted to come up with some kind of scoring / ranking process for ideas. I have a spreadsheet which i can use to score one of 15 attributes of a business idea. I have weighted some attributes as more important than others (each is scored 1-5, with 5 being important). While this is not going to provide the definitive way for me to make a decision, at least it’s a reference point.

I remember going through a similar exercise when trying to decide what house to buy. Funnily, the house that scored best was not the one i lumped for. I had a huge negative reaction to the winner in favor of the runner up. Most importantly, the winner was clear.