The Art Of Opportunity Thinking

“Choose a business you love and
 you will never work a day in your life”
                                after Confucius

The key to finding the best small business for you is to match your skills, knowledge, experience and aptitudes with a business type most suited to you.  This requires that you develop a very basic marketing skill at finding and identifying business opportunities I call “Opportunity Thinking”.  This is a skill anyone can learn.  Yes, some people will be better than others spotting opportunity, but anyone can learn.

What it Opportunity Thinking? 
It is the practice of looking at the needs, wants and desires of the people in your community or across the country, and seeing how a product or service can fulfill these needs.  To help you get the idea, let’s look at some examples of Opportunity Thinking in practice using several classic examples.
   Back in the 1950’s, a milk-shake machine salesman Ray Kroc noticed that teenagers at hamburger stands his sales area used the stands as a meeting point to socialize.  Boys would drive their hot cars into the parking lot and girls would stop to admire and flirt, and along the way, the kids would purchase sodas and burgers and fries.  No matter where the salesman went, he saw the same phenomena of teenagers, cars and burgers.
   Now, White Castle had introduced the hamburger stand restaurant years earlier.  By the fifties, our country was littered with thousands of small independent hamburger stands.  Most owners of these stands considered the kids who hung out in their parking lots to be a nuisance rather than an opportunity.  Kroc saw these kids as opportunity -- they were spending a lot of money at these stores while hanging out there after school and weekends.  When he could, Mr. Kroc purchased a hamburger stand from a family named McDonald, and went to work catering to the teen age market of the time -- the baby boom.  Where the owners of so many hamburger stands tried to discourage kids hanging out, Kroc welcomed them.
   Kroc’s sole innovation, if you want to call it that, was to standardize the products, the menus, the service and the appearance of the restaurants so that what you get at a McDonald’s in Bar Harbour, Maine, is the same as you get in San Diego, California.  As the chain grew, teens from coast to coast began hanging out at McDonalds, and sales exploded.  Kroc saw opportunity in the kids and a way to take advantage of this opportunity with his restaurants.
   At about the same time, Ford Motor Company was spending millions to develop the ultimate car of the future, a car for middle-class families -- the Edsel.  Many of the innovative features introduced on the Edsel are now standard equipment on today’s cars, but in the late fifties, these features just didn’t interest enough buyers, and Ford lost a fortune.  Was the Edsel a better product?  Yes.  Did anyone care?  No.  The Edsel is now a business-school case study on how not to introduce a new product or service.  The point being that marketing is the science and art of looking for needs and wants in customers, and figuring out a way to meet those needs. . . at a profit.

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    Ford after the Edsel debacle was leery of new product introductions, so when a young engineer came forward with another new product, management wasn’t overwhelmed with excitement.   The engineer, Lee Iococa, noticed that the kids hanging out at the McDonalds and other hamburger stands in his neighborhood were taking the old caste iron monster cars of the era and customizing them.  Teenagers were chopping, channeling, souping up and showing off their fast, sporty looking home built cars in the parking lots of hamburger stands from coast to coast.  Kids who drove their parent’s clunky looking over-weight Detroit monsters were looked down upon with pity by their hipper peers.  (If you don’t remember this phenomena or were too young, check out the movie “American Graffiti” from your local video store and watch it.)
   After spending the millions on the Edsel, Ford was a little gun-shy about new car introductions, but Iococa was able to talk upper management into introducing a sportier car aimed at this growing youth market.  Ford’s product development folks didn’t spend very much to develop the car.  They took the heavy, rounded body of an existing standard family sedan and put a lighter sporty body on its frame and drive train, took out the bench seat and installed bucket seats, painted the car in brighter colors, and introduced the Mustang.  Kids went wild, as did their families.  Ford simply could not build them fast enough.  Soon GM, Chrysler and AMC were introducing their own younger, sportier cars with wonderful success.

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   This is Opportunity Thinking:  Looking for needs of an existing market, and then offering products that meet this need.  In Opportunity Thinking, the market comes first, then the product, which is exactly the reverse of what so many small business owners think. 
   Opportunity Thinking involves problem solving.  As the baby boom married and had children of their own, their needs changed.  McDonald’s introduced inside seating.  Drive through windows so mom or dad boomer could pick up dinner on the way home from work.  Play areas so that mom and dad boomer could have a few peaceful moments while eating to talk without the kids hanging all over them.  A breakfast menu so mom or dad boomer could get something to eat on the way to work.  Now, they're responding to the market by adding a coffee bar and smoothies.
   Other small business owners took advantage of the changing needs of the boomer market, introducing maid services, yard care services and shopping or errand services.  Before the baby boom, only the well to do had maids and gardeners.  After the baby boom came of age, weekly maid and yard service is almost a necessity.  Errand and shopping services are common too.  In many large cities, people started very successful “concierge” services in large office buildings and business parks to take care of the needs of the very busy people who work there.
   There is nothing new or particularly innovative about these services, other than they are being offered to the middle class instead of the wealthy.  Instead of a maid working full or part time for one client, housekeeping companies now have many clients, spending two or three hours a week in a number of middle class homes. 

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   It’s important to note that opportunity thinking does not require the introduction of new products, either.  All that is needed is to make the product look new or innovative.  Here’s an example:  Brewers have always had to sterilize the bottles into which they pour beer, or the yeasts and bacteria that float around in the air will contaminate and spoil it.  All brewers pre-wash and sterilize their bottles just before filling them.  They have to or the beer will spoil.  Yet one small, local brewery in Milwaukie, Wisconsin, used this fact to create a national market for their product. 
   Back in the late 19th century, there was a growing knowledge that cleanliness and antiseptic procedures could reduce disease, something we take for granted today.  Then, it was something of a break through.  The brewery’s advertising agency designed campaigns spreading the news (consumers love news) that their beer bottles were sterile, therefore, their beer was a healthier, safer beverage to enjoy.  This claim -- perfectly true -- led to an explosive growth in sales, taking the brand to national dominance in just a few short years.  It didn’t matter that all brewers wash and sterilize their bottles.  Schlitz was the first to recognize the need felt by the public for a healthier beverage, and capitalized on it.
   So how do you learn Opportunity Thinking?  You probably already have done some opportunity thinking.  Have you ever thought to yourself, “I wish someone was around to take care of this for me.”  I have. And that's the basic technique which we'll explore and develop tomorrow.

Tomorrow:  Conducting an Opportunity Search