ENTERPRISE54 – Do what you love and you don’t ever have to work. Forgive the pretty rough paraphrase of the famous Confucian philosophy, but how can passion (doing what you love) be transformed into a profitable business?

Steve Jobs, Ashish J. Thakkar, Dylan Lauren, Gossy Ukanwoke all managed to pull these off. But what do these entrepreneurs have in common? They each transformed their passion into a business venture and made tons of profit from it. Although some quarters argue that some ( perhaps, Jobs and Thakkar) later diversified interests, the Harvard Business Reviews’ The Disciplined Pursuit of Less tells of achieving success from the pursuit of a few, which gradually cascades into multiple opportunities and interests. However, that’s all side talk. The issue here still is how do we turn raw passion to a business venture?

The first step is streamlining such passions into viable business models. Juxtaposing them against existing models, tweaking, fine-tuning and eventually coming up with an answer to “how do I make money” from, say, skydiving?

After that the creativity and innovation needed to give you a competitive edge will come naturally. Remember, Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life (finally got the right quote). Although this might sound too easy, a thorough examination reveals the amount of due diligence that has to go into aligning your passion to a business model and succeeding with the venture. Dylan Lauren, daughter of clothing magnate Ralph Lauren, proves this right.

Dylan Lauren’s candy business started from a sweet tooth (or passion for candy) and she has been able to turn that into a viable business.

Inspiration for her candy business came after she saw the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory at age six! Ms Lauren resolved to find a way to make it to the factory (develop a business model that aligns with her passion).

“I saw it and loved the movie, and the idea of living in a candy world stayed with me … I just wanted to live in a world full of candy. Movies like that, or Disney movies or The Wizard of Oz still inspire me in terms of a fantasy world,” she says in a 2013 interview with the Observer.
How she made it happen?

Dylan Lauren created more of an experience than a retail store, tapping from her passion which fuelled innovation and creativity that made her exceed competitors.

Today, her kid fantasy has been transformed to a business ready to expand to airports across the US. Surely, that didn’t come from nothing! Even the savvy Ralph Lauren didn’t see that coming. But it just proves that you can create a business from your passion and be successful at it.