How to redefine business opportunities
When you become clear about something, subconsciously, you come under pressure to be sure of your decision. Hence, you take time to decide.
As long as you live and want to survive, you will always keep looking for opportunities.
Opportunities to do better in your Job. Studies. Marriage. Business. Life. etc. etc.
For 16 years I have been in management. Throughout, I have dealt with business opportunities. Simplistically, the process of opportunity identification was this.
Identify a customer pain point that’s going unaddressed. In other words, identify a market gap. Provide a solution to address that pain point. If there is enough pool of customers you can build a viable business.
You can offer the solution in two ways. In exchange for commerce. Or not.
The former is how commercial ventures operate. The latter is how NGOs, Nonprofits operate.
But the approach to the identification of an opportunity remains the same.
It is through the pain point of the target audience.
Let me pivot a little. NGOs and Nonprofits being non-commercial, cannot classify themselves as businesses.
Hence, to include both commercial and non-commercial entities, I use the word ‘Venture’.
If you search on Google the following:
‘How to identify business opportunities?’ you will get about 870 million results.
But if you type the following:
‘How to identify venture opportunities?’ you will get about 134 million results.
Notice how the results vary by changing the word ‘business’ to ‘venture’.
Nonetheless, it proves that identifying opportunities is an important topic.
I felt the importance of it when I started mentoring in entrepreneurship. Individuals from various countries approached me. Many of them asked me to guide them in identifying opportunities to build a business.
That puzzled me. Why ask, when one could google about it?
The point here is that it got me thinking about the following questions:
- How to guide people in the identification of venture opportunities in a more effective way?
- Must venture opportunity identification be always through consumer pain points?
To answer the first question I redefined the meaning of ‘opportunity’ as this
Definition of the word ‘opportunity’.
Google defines it as ‘A time or set of circumstances that makes it possible to do something.’
To me ‘Something’ is very broad.
This also means you could contextualize it and appropriate it for your use.
In my case of mentoring on entrepreneurship, I defined it this way.
Opportunity is a scope.
A scope to offer a service or a product to improve lives. The returns for such offers could either be commerce or self-satisfaction or both.
Hence, I say that there are three types of opportunities.
- Business opportunity 2) Serving opportunity and 3) serving a community through a business opportunity.
Business opportunity. When you offer a product or a service and receive economic gain in return. A.K.A commercial ventures.
Serving opportunity. When you offer a product or a service without any economic gain. The end users do not make any monetary transactions. You are there to improve lives. So all you can derive is self-satisfaction. You do get a salary though. A.K.A NGOs, Nonprofit ventures.
The third kind involves economic gains. But it happens through offering quality products specifically designed for a marginalized community. Earlier they didn’t have access to such products. Now they do for which they pay very little. A.K.A Social Enterprise.
Once I explain the three definitions to my mentees I ask them this.
So what opportunity will you go for?
Many hesitate. Take time to answer.
Because
When individuals become clear about something, they come under pressure to be sure of their decision.
Human beings like to be sure of their decision.
Hence, they take time.
When that happens I ask my mentees not to decide. I ask them to remain open, instead.
Once they are open-minded I introduce them to various ways of utilizing their skill sets.
You can pretty much do anything you like if it matches your skill set.
Even a partial match is good enough to get started.
So what you can do? you can…
- Build your product
- Become an expert and share knowledge
- Consult on what you love and care
- Drive collaboration between people
- Work for organizations that deal in your area of love and care.
- (find a new way that’s different than the ones mentioned above)
You could choose to do any or all of them in the following ways:
You could seize an opportunity to get paid. Then you are doing business.
You could seize an opportunity to make affordable quality products for a marginalized community. Then you are serving as well as making commercial gains.
You could seize an opportunity to offer products and services for free. Then you are serving.
The choice is yours.
A mentee of mine from Ghana wanted to open an NGO to tackle mental health issues among the youth.
As a first step, I asked him why he wanted to do it. It turned out that he suffered from it. Hence, he felt the need to save others from it.
Then I asked him to take stock of the resources he has to open an NGO. It turned out that he didn’t have much.
So the first reality check happened. Always be aware of the resources that are required for starting a venture.
So, I told him to first look for an opportunity to do some kind of business to get the cash flow going. He loved to cook. Also, he was street-smart.
Through research, he found out that people in his village loved grilled and fried chicken. They would make weekly trips to the city to eat at KFC and other restaurants. So, I asked him if he would like to take a tiny market share from those restaurants.
The idea was to offer tasty grilled and fried chicken at a cost lower than the competition. Also, reach the chicken to the doorstep of the consumers.
So he offered a competitive rate without compromising on the quality of the product. Also, he differentiated from the competition by adding doorstep delivery.
About a year into the business now, he is doing very well. ‘Grill Sane’ is the name of his brand.
He visits consumers’ homes and takes orders from the previous day. The next day early at 5.30 AM’ ish the grill goes on. The chicken gets ready by around 11 AM. By lunch hours they reach the customer’s home.
Now, he can buy the required medicine by running his business. Which is keeping his mental health issues in check. Also, he is collecting cash to open a mental health NGO of his own.
Cash flow is like oxygen to business and life.
Two things happened here.
First, my mentee ideated and then researched. In the next step, he became clear about the type of opportunity he needed to pursue to survive.
Second, opportunity identification happened NOT through identifying customer pain points.
But by creating a need.
Earlier no one thought of having grilled and fried chicken home delivered. But now they do.
Identification of opportunities through customer pain points would have led him to NGO.
Instead, he remained open to creating a new need. Thus creating a new business opportunity for himself.
In summary
When you are identifying an opportunity for entrepreneurship first ideate.
Then do research.
That way you will be able to make a more informed decision about the type of opportunity you want to pursue.
