No More Cowboys

Actions bring a plan to life

Many years ago, in the early days of the internet, in a small office in Otley – a market town near Leeds – I had a genuinely good idea. I know it was good because someone else got quite rich from it.

I was drinking awful coffee when I sketched the idea out on a sheet of paper: a website listing all the local tradespeople, where anyone could leave an honest review. Perhaps a certification scheme too, tied to the council or trading standards. I talked it through with friends. I drew a rough architecture. I pondered the name for days until it arrived, and it was, I still maintain, a very good name: No More Cowboys – cowboy being the common British word for the sort of builder who takes your deposit and your dignity and is never seen again.

Then I spent about a year on it. More sketches. More plans. More task lists, more marketing ideas, more elaborate models of all the potential. It felt wonderful. I loved it. It felt, above all, productive. And then one afternoon I saw a sticker on the side of a builder's van for something called Checkatrade. Dammit.

Undeterred, I moved on to my next certain fortune: smart food shopping. I'd decided that one day our fridges and cupboards would all be online, that home delivery was only going to grow, and that it would be marvellous if an app knew what you already had in stock, and could suggest recipes to match – or, the reverse, let you announce you fancied Gordon Ramsay's miso-maple leeks and order in whatever you were missing, all behind the scenes. I pondered that one at length too. At length, and then a little longer, and a little longer, until a range of emerging services sauntered past me and did roughly the thing while I was looking at in my notebook.

I've had a lot of good ideas. Both of those I planned beautifully and methodically – named them, sketched them, modelled them, loved them – right up until someone who loved the idea, and moved into action sooner, went and built it.

I used to tell myself the planning was the work, and it certainly felt like the work; there is nothing more productive-feeling than a fresh notebook, a good pen, a big idea, a nice pot of tea and an afternoon to make models of everything it might become.

But a plan is a lovely, safe, careful place to live, precisely because nothing has gone wrong there yet. The idea is still perfectly open to suggestions, edits, refinement and more thinking – right there on the page. No customer has looked at it and frowned, or refused to pay. No builder has ignored the certification scheme. It's all still possible – which is a wonderful feeling, but not where an idea should stay, not if we wish to turn it into something real, to offer to other people, to potentially derive some value from it.

The difference between an idea alone and an idea that becomes a product, service or even a business, is mostly just the people who got into action building the thing, not endless planning. Many people are not always cleverer, nor more talented, nor a genius underneath. They often don't have better resources, or more funding. They simply put the thing in front of the world a good deal sooner than others, and let the making of the idea inform, and the shipping of the idea to the world start telling them what it actually was.

I still think No More Cowboys was a good name. If I'd built it instead of admiring it, I might be writing this from a yacht off the coast of Greece sipping a nice cocktail. Instead I'm writing it from a desk, which I've long since made my peace with – and which is, I suppose, a nice circular close to the essay. The desk is where you plan the yacht. Somebody else is already out on the water.