When Opportunity Knocks

Opportunities can be very significant because unanticipated business events or brain storms, if exploited vigorously and expeditiously, can result in...

* Major expansions of sales and handsome profits,

* Protective diversification,

* Greatly increase share of market to ensure organizational survival or

* Help their faltering or failing operations survive when business owners see their problems as challenges instead of problems.

Being able to exploit unanticipated events, whether of a business or personal nature, can be significant for many reasons. Most urgent is survival, finding a way out of or around a situation that threatens the very existence of one’s business or employment. In the next chapter, I will detail the way in which Benjamin Eisenstadt, whose business was threatened with failure, converted what appeared to be imminent extinction into a great opportunity, one that still thrives over 50 years later.

To my mind the most appealing or exciting opportunity is one that results in an entirely new product, process or service, one with several benefits, such as: makes life more attractive for many; creates an enterprise that employs many; saves energy or some other increasingly scare commodity; and, hopefully reduces the enormous and ever-growing imbalance of payments burdening the U.S. economy. The great example cited is A. G. Decker’s launching of a company that makes portable power tools, today’s giant, multinational Black & Decker Corporation.

You don’t have to launch a new business to exploit an opportunity. Most opportunists happily expand an existing business, the way Henry Ford did by introducing a pick-up truck version of his epochal Model T.

Few opportunists can match in sales volume Ford’s inspired reproduction of the pick-up truck. It resulted in a multi-billion-dollar market in which pick-up trucks, like Ford’s model F150, outsell the most-popular sedans.

Escape from Dead-end Jobs

There’s another important reason why opportunities are significant. They are a way for hundreds of thousands if not millions of people stuck in dead-end jobs, no longer employed or working in low-paid jobs other than those for which they were trained to realize their hopes of making it. Unfortunately, job opportunities are shrinking in the U.S. Those employed can no longer count on ever-rising salaries and more-responsible jobs. Then there are all those professionals and executives who’ve lost well-paying jobs as giant companies shed employees, often because they’re moving departments or entire operations outside the U.S. For these unhappy, competent people, exploiting an opportunity may be the only way to achieve their ambitions–and afford to send their children to college.

Most of these would-be opportunists would be satisfied to create a business that merely grosses a million dollars a year, but the more energetic and focused among them could create businesses grossing $20 million a year or more a year. This has been done over and over again. Why not try to do the same!   

An Ancient Trait

Taking advantage of opportunities is apparently an ancient if not essential trait, one that contributed to the survival and continued evolution of humans. An example is prehistoric man’s domestication of the wolf into useful dogs beginning at least 15,000 years ago, perhaps even earlier; paleontologists have surmised that starving, Asiatic wolves approached humans cooking around warm camp fires in a submissive manner and were accepted. (All of the enormous variety of dogs today are descended from the small, Asiatic wolf  based on studies of their mitochondrial D.N.A. sequences.)