Preparing for the most unexpected opportunities

While the MENA region has made impressive leaps towards mass-scale renewable energy resources, the announcement of a new oil discovery is still cause for significant interest. When Bahrain announced it had made its biggest discovery since 1932, there was understandable attention being paid to the potential scale of the find.

With a reportedly enormous quantity of oil and gas, there are plenty of people excited at the opportunities that might become available. This made me think about how business opportunities can suddenly appear, whatever the industry you might be in.

You can run a business with a particular understanding of your markets, your competitors, and your customers, and then abruptly have your world shaken by a new and unexpected development.

In itself, such change is a natural and an inevitable part of business. Even the seemingly pedestrian and moderately-paced of industries will still be upset occasionally by a market change that sends everyone spinning in a different direction. What is of more interest is not the rapid nature of the change, but how individual businesses and their leaders react to the opportunities that the change creates.

When new opportunities present themselves, how a business reacts to making the most of their appearance can often be a significant part of how successful the business is overall.

In many industries, for example, there has been a consistent sense of excitable impatience about how best to utilise the internet, smartphones, and consumers’ ever-present interest in sharing online. A few years ago, it felt like everybody was scrambling to build their own smartphone app, and optimise their website so it shone brightest whenever their customers sat down to search. What resulted from this effort was often half-baked, poorlythought out apps that offered customers no real utility, and no compelling reason to download and log-in. While some brands certainly maximised the opportunity presented at the time, many others failed to fully grasp what the opportunity really was, and how it could add benefit to their business.

If this shows us anything, then, it is that reacting to opportunity shouldn’t be done on impulse, and it shouldn’t be done on a vague hope. Instead, it needs to be an active process aimed first at understanding what the opportunity actually is. If a new market suddenly opens up, your business needs to understand the cultural background of customers, the legislative nuances of the local business world, and the most appropriate approaches to marketing your offering.

Training

If technology suddenly makes a production process possible, you should be investigating what training your employees will need, and what consequent impact a wholesale change of operations might have on your supply chain.

Of course, the nature of fast-moving developments is that you often do not have much time to sit and think. The business world is certainly more familiar with the stories of companies that failed to act quick enough than it is of companies that seized the moment and were first-in on a new opportunity.

For every Tesla, there are many more car manufacturers who are struggling to catch up with their own electric cars. For every Apple, there are numerous electronics firms desperate to create their own iPhone.

But acting at speed shouldn’t mean dropping a studied approach to opportunity. You should always go in with full awareness of what’s possible, and full intent about how you will achieve it.

Rather than clairvoyance, this should be based on a consistent process of analysing your current business, conducting regular research on the broader market, and then taking an educated guess approach to assessing whether even the wildest of opportunities might appear.

This is not actually all that different from how good companies approach future planning in other areas. Many firms are comfortable looking way into the future when it comes to their talent pipeline and their leadership succession.

They will also happily forecast profits, demand, and future product choices. Taking a similar, sensible approach to preparing their business for “expected unexpected developments” could place them in the best position to strike first when a great opportunity appears.