“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”
~ Thomas A. Edison
Tough Times Call for…
There are two things that will help you thrive (or at least survive) in tough times.
I’m really not a mindless ‘Pollyanna’ type (although I think that she gets a bad rap sometimes). I have lived alongside people whose precarious livelihood is at the mercy of natural disasters like locusts, drought, floods and cyclones, and human-created disasters like military invasion, political games, and mercantile interests. Life can be dangerous and your options can be extremely limited. These two solutions are still valid.
- Open eyes and creative thinking. These are the hallmarks of ’thrivers’. They live in the same reality as every one else, but they are willing to consider it from a different angle… And so they see opportunities to meet needs rather than a blockade.
- Willingness to work hard and cop criticism. These two go hand-in-hand, particularly in conservative society where ‘tall-poppy syndrome’ is rampant and anyone doing better than their neighbours is suspect.
Do You Know How to Spot Opportunities?
The way I see it, there are opportunities and there is opportunism.
Opportunism could be like the situation we saw many times in Africa:
An Agency send representatives to look at the food security situation and determine whether food aid will be needed. They are shown fields that are not even under cultivation (full of weeds, and dead stalks) by political appointees who will benefit from being seen handing out food and by transport merchants whose trucks will be used to carry the food. They do not talk to farmers whose harvest will be devalued by the food aid and whose debt for the seed they planted is owed to the transport merchants.
That’s profitable, clever, but exploitative.
The ability to spot opportunities, on the other hand, is when you see a need and move swiftly to meet it – profitably, even if it’s just short term.
We saw that through a couple of cholera epidemics when MSF (Medicins san Frontieres) and other NGOs came to help and locals set up popular pop-up restaurants so that had some alternative places to eat. They saw the opportunity to meet a need and take advantage to channel some money from outside into the community. For some families, this provided the capital to start other businesses.
You might be thinking that these scenarios are a long way from your daily business reality… But are they?
The past year has given us plenty of examples of opportunism throughout western society in political, health, and mercantile arenas. It has also been fertile field where disrupted businesses have creatively worked out how to offer new services and products, or different media. Some of them will never go back to their old way of doing business, others will simply take the new confidence they have found with them – confidence that they can figure out a way to face anything, because they can spot opportunity.
Trust is Vital, but…
Trust is possibly the greatest non-monetary asset your business has, but it doesn’t just mean that you always do the same things in the same way.
Your customers need to trust that you’re looking out for their best interests, not just delivering the same service. Consistency builds trust. Without consistency you can’t gain anyone’s trust, but without flexibility and innovation you won’t hold their trust.
Businesses build trust by offering appropriate solutions to today’s problems, not by living in the past, so what are you doing to demonstrate to your loyal customers (those people who have the ‘custom’ of buying from you) that you are not mindlessly serving up the same thing, but that you are thinking, researching, and working to consistently offer the best solution for today… Just like you were doing the day they discovered you.
Boredom Busters
A new twist on an old flavour keeps people engaged.
You may not be a fan of the Incredible Hulk, but you need to know a little bit about his story… once upon a time there were rabid Hulk fans who loved reading his adventures – but there weren’t very many of them and he was due to be retired for lack of interest. A different writer / illustrator team took on the assignment and they changed his colour, made him smart (as well as big) and developed new storylines.
Suddenly Hulk had a whole bunch of new readers… And a heap of old readers who were angered, outraged… And seriously engaged with what the next outrageous variation on his story might be because there was just enough ‘old Hulk’ in there to keep them intrigued.
That is a boredom buster.
Controversy and challenge are great boredom busters for any product. If demand for your products and services has slowed, think about how you can insert some intrigue and challenge of your own.
