Ideas are cheap. Opportunities get vetted.

It is Sunday night. The workshop ended Friday at noon, and the notebook is still open on the kitchen table. Twenty-three ideas, three colors of highlighter, a few circled twice. A second route. A subscription plan. An app. A partnership from lunch on day one. You have run a unit, a region or a team before, so you know a list when you see one. This list has no order, and every line looks like a yes.

The usual fix is to pick the one you are most excited about. It rarely holds, because the excitement was produced by the workshop. A good workshop is built to produce twenty-three ideas. What it cannot supply is a reason the market will move money toward any of them.

Take an owner I will describe here. She spent twenty years running operations for a hospital system, then started a specimen and supply courier company outside Houston. Fourteen drivers, a dispatch board, a reputation for showing up. She went to a good workshop and came home with the notebook. She asked me which of the twenty-three to start on Monday.

What is the difference between an idea and an opportunity?

An idea becomes an opportunity only after it has been vetted. Until then it is an idea, and ideas are cheap.

So I start with the market, not the notebook. I asked her what the leaders in her market complain about out loud. Board meetings, trade press, expansion announcements. The health system was opening outpatient sites faster than it could staff the logistics between them. That is a shortage the leaders are naming, and it sits against a budget line.

Now the notebook means something. Each idea gets held up to that shortage and asked five questions, in writing. In my experience the head will pass anything it is excited about. Paper will not.

Why do I think of it as a preflight?

A pilot can want to go to any airport within three hundred miles. Wanting is the easy part. Before the engine starts, the pilot runs the same questions on every trip: is there a reason to go, is the route open, do I understand the conditions on both ends, is the airplane loaded for it, and am I current and rested enough to fly it. A trip that fails one of those does not depart that day. It goes on the list for another day.

That is what the five questions do to the notebook. The notebook is a map with twenty-three airports on it, each one a nice place to land. The five questions are the preflight, and the answer to any one of them can be “not today.”

What are the five questions?

First comes the gap: a shortage being named against demand that can pay. Second, the insight: a way to rearrange people, assets, access and relationships into a pathway others are not drawing. Third, the understanding of the people on both sides, the problem as they carry it, and the process to close it. Fourth, the return on action, meaning something real for every party needed to close the gap. Fifth, your WAR, which is whether you are willing, able and ready to move on it.

The app failed at the first question. Few people with a budget were asking for an app, and none she knew. The partnership from lunch failed at the third, because she knew nothing yet about that partner’s people or process. The subscription plan had a real gap but failed at the fourth: the lab buyers she knew run on quarterly contracts, so a subscription gave them no return they could book.

One idea cleared all five. A cold-chain run between freestanding emergency rooms and the reference lab. The insight was a rearrangement of what she already held: two drivers with the right training, a refrigerated van she could lease before buying, and a lab logistics manager she knew from her hospital years. The lab gets faster turnaround. The drivers get steady shifts. The health system gets fewer rejected specimens. She gets margin and a contract. And she wanted it, which is the fifth question.

How do I test it before I spend anything?

Take it to three people who can sign. That is a shorter list than the people who would use it, and it is the list that counts. Ask each one a real question: would you sign for this, and would you put a deposit down? Write down the answers word for word.

A yes with a signature or money behind it is evidence. “Sounds great” is a pleasant afternoon. She asked three lab and logistics directors. Two gave her a name and a date for the paperwork. One said it sounded great. She counted two.

Then the second conversation, because labor is a customer too. She asked two drivers whether they would take the run on the terms she could offer. Both said yes. I keep those counts apart. Two willing drivers say nothing about whether anyone will buy, and two buyers say nothing about whether anyone will drive.

If two of three buyers come back as evidence, the idea earns a business case with their names on it. If one does, you have a lead and permission for a trial no bigger than that one buyer. If none does, you learned something for the price of three conversations.

What happens to the ideas that do not pass?

They go in the parking lot. Each one gets a line on one page, the question it failed, and a date to look again, usually ninety days out. Markets move, and an idea that failed question three in October can pass it in January once you have met the right person.

The pressure to pick comes from treating the list as a verdict on your creativity. It is a queue. The parking lot keeps the creative part of you employed while the market tells you which one to run first.

The Deal Maker’s five is yours to use freely. It is the same set of questions the people who fund businesses ask before money moves, and you can run it on any idea in about ninety minutes.

The move for this week

Monday: look at the list and mark the one you would not be mad you tried a year from now, even if it failed. Start there.

Tuesday: write the five answers on a single page. If an answer will not come, stop at that question. That gap is your research assignment before anything else gets built or bought.

Wednesday through Friday: put it in front of three people who can sign and ask the one question. Write down what they say.

Then take the other twenty-two to the parking lot, each with a failed question and a date.

Twenty-three ideas is a good week at a workshop. One with a signature behind it is the start of a business.