better business blog

Tips and stories to add value to you and your organisation

How To Create Opportunity

9 September 2019

The art of good busines is to spot an opportunity when it swims by, reach out and grab it and then to deliver on it with panache.

It’s often not about having the best idea in the world, but instead having a good idea and making sure it’s executed to a high standard.

If we think about Facebook for a moment, it seems like a clever idea. However, it was at first designed as a college picture board, called, rather miserably, Rate a Hottie.

This generated traffic and interest and was developed from there. And in essence it’s a build on Friends Reunited.

Friends Reunited was the big noise in websites many years ago and it made its inventors rich people. It then made the company that purchased it poor people, because the site was eclipsed by the juggernaut driven by Mark Zuckerberg.

Opportunity is often about doing it bigger and bolder and better. Tapping into a need and then mining out all profit possibilities with speed.

We can create opportunities for ourselves by being ready and by being humble.

Being humble means to know that we are not the smartest person, or the most creative. This allows us to see the world around us with more clarity and in doing so we are likely to see other ideas and wonder if we can build on them ourselves. Tweak them, shape them, add what’s missing and deliver a package to amaze our customers and startle our competitors.

Being ready means to have some new angle in our pocket. A new angle can be a new piece of machinery, a draft product, a new skill, or a new team.

I’m about to start year 3 of psychotherapy training. It’s great fun, I love to learn and my colleagues are a great bunch. I’m still an organisational coach, I love that work immensely. However, the new training has broadened my skills and now means I can offer people counselling services and also tap into the growing well-being market.

Initially I set out to learn something new as an interesting project, but I’ve now had a number of interesting client conversations that have lead to more business. I know that the discipline of clinical work has fed back into my coaching work and has given me greater market place differentiation from a lot of my competitors.

Coaching on the surface can be great and yet I’ve always worked with harder cases and people who value deeper insights into organisational behaviour.

In doing this training I’m ready for new opportunities and am creating them as I journey through my varied and interesting business life.

It’s tempting to wait for a client to ask for something before we develop new ways of working. Steve Jobs tended to take the view that customers didn’t know what they wanted until they saw it. Hence the success of the first iPhone, which sadly rendered my beloved Blackberry a museum piece.

Sometimes we have to do things and trust that they will bring rewards. We have to create the opportunities for ourselves.

So, this week, where can you be humble in your work and pay attention to someone else? What new things do you have to initiate?

If you don’t, then it’s a fair bet that someone else will. Friends Reunited vs Facebook …which side do you wish you had bought shares in?

Next week: Always Play Nice