That is the question. That and what can you do better tomorrow that you did today?

With that in mind, I’m organizing a Business Hack-a-Thon next month in my office building. It’s for us and everybody else in the building. I want everyone to come together and see different points of view. This is an opportunity to mix it up, get people uncomfortable, change roles and see anew.

This is really a test so I can then hopefully expand it outside the four walls.

Anyway, one of the key questions that’s come up while we’re preparing for this is: how do we put a concept to the test  if my business is not online?

It depends. In the online world you can iterate and change thing very fast. Feedback loops are ubiquitous. We can setup a website rather quickly and put it through user testing for a few hundred bucks and voila, you have results. But an offline business doesn’t have the advantage of modifying itself on command and seeing results immediately.

Or so you think.

Tomorrow I’ll show you how you can run a test using my hypothetical example of movie theaters as edu-tainment from last weeks post on disassembling and re-imagining. It’s not as fast as what we can do on the web, but it’s close.

Get out of the Box

But more importantly before we dig in, a Hack-A-Thon is an opportunity for you to re-evaluate how you do things and think about how you could them differently. Or simply stop doing them at all.

It’s an opportunity to do something you wanted to do for a long time but haven’t done so. It’s an opportunity to get out of the box. It’s an opportunity to not be afraid and just let it fly. It’s an opportunity to put everyone in a room and say: Let’s transform ourselves into something completely different.

It’s about setting an example towards cultivating a growth mindset and be constantly improving and evolving.

So ask yourself: What can I do to improve my business in a day?

Or put another way: If you knew your business had one day to live, what would you do differently to change the outcome?

What’s your experience with business hack-a-thons? Got anything to share?