Exploiting Opportunities

Every business has opportunities it doesn’t exploit. Sometimes they are just ideas that pass quickly through someone’s head and other times they are complex concepts which have been thoroughly studied and then for some reason or another end up on the shelf gathering dust. 

It’s not hard to see why this happens. Most of the time in business, we are consumed with the everyday issues of finding and satisfying customers. At BML we call those activities “The Business Comfort Zone” or Quadrant One. 

The trouble with Quadrant One is that you can’t continue operating there forever. Someday something will happen and your Quadrant One business will start to disappear. Sometimes its in a crises and sometime it happens slowly. But it Will happen eventually. It happened to me despite the fact that I knew better. 

When your quadrant one business goes away suddenly you are forced into one or more of the other three quadrants, either selling existing products to new customers (Quadrant II) , selling new products to existing customers (Quadrant III)  or the most risky alternative, new products to new customers (Quadrant IV) . When you operate in those quadrants you have a myriad of new issues to deal with. You cant fall back on your standard processes that worked so well in Quadrant One. You HAVE to do some things differently. 

At BML we help you assemble  a process to evaluate the opportunities in those other 3 quadrants before you are forced to activate them in a crisis situation. We help you do what small businesses seldom do because they cant extract enough time from Quadrant One , we help you compare opportunities, and compare them at the same time against the same standards. 

First we help you find them and define the opportunities, taking them off the dusty shelves and into an active database. They we help you to compare them on the same basis. What is the potential revenue from a given concept? How much time and money is it likely to take to study and implement that concept? Which concepts should be done first and which should be done later? 

We help you choose among them and put together action plans to exploit those opportunities that you pick. 

There are two benefits that come from using this method. 

1. The revenues and profits that come from new opportunities successfully exploited.
2. The savings from not exploiting opportunities thathave a low probability of success or are too costly for the enterprise to sustain.

 

The first of these two benefits is pretty obvious. The second isn’t. But consider for a moment the cost to a business of jumping into the wrong opportunity in a crisis situation. Such a misstep may put company out of business. 

We teach that a company needs  a portfolio of evaluated and ranked  opportunities on the shelf to draw from, either  to feed slowly into the business  or to grab for if quick action is required. We don’t only help you plan them out, we can also provide some of the services needed to evaluate your opportunities, either from our own resources or from our many alliance partners.

 

To learn more send us an email to sales@businessmetamorphosis.com or call (585) 520-3539 and tell Dick you read this article.