Business-shifting opportunity events are rare. These are circumstances where you discover new markets and business possibilities almost out of the blue. I can count five or six of these situations in my lifetime.
I’m going through one of these events now. It isn’t time to announce the details in public because there is much work to do before it is right to make an announcement. But if all goes according to plan, we’ll be up and running with a new business corporation, staff, operations, and systems, and an intensive production schedule, in about three weeks.
The discovery (epiphany) occurred when I read an obscure document last week, which had two key small words that created the opportunity.
Most “out of the blue” business opportunities aren’t total surprises, of course, and this one is not different form the rest. As I read the document, I visualized how we could implement the discovery — and began the fact checking and validation process to make sure that the idea isn’t a false positive. (It may still hit a roadblock — but I’m confident enough in the process to start the necessary IT work, staff recruiting, and planning — obviously necessary for the initiative to turn into action in less than a month.)
The challenge with opportunities like this is whether we are ready to move forward with them when they happen. We can play it safe, or we can stretch our limbs. There are ways to mitigate some of the risks, of course, and I’ve done an analysis that concludes that the risk of failure, while real, wouldn’t result in exceptionally great hardship.
Have you had eye-opening opportunities and taken them? Or have you seen them slip by, and you regretted not doing anything about them. I welcome your comments.
