Click HERE to watch the video

Business Opportunity

A while ago, I wrote about increased business opportunity for small businesses and solopreneurs and how Internet technology (among other things) has made it easier and more accessible for entrepreneurially-minded people to develop their concepts.

When I posted the article, I thought many of the opportunities we talked about would remain unexploited because you were put off by the daunting task of creating software or taking your idea to the marketplace. But those roadblocks didn't seem to hold you back. Instead, the comments I received were more concerned with finding the new ideas in the first place.

Unlike many established businesses that struggle with implementation, I learned you're not concerned about how you will get the job done. Instead, you're thinking about what job you want to work on in the first place.

That's great news. It shows that you're a damn-the-torpedoes kind of entrepreneur; Someone just has to show you the hill, and you'll storm it! You're ready, willing, and able to do the work. You just need to see the business opportunity and what work you need to do.

Business Opportunity

Well, here's the secret – figuring out where the business opportunity is the easy part. Because today, opportunities are all around you.

All you need to do is pay attention.

Everywhere you look, you'll find unmet needs where consumers want to purchase something to fix their problems. Your business opportunity is hidden in plain sight.

The trick is to get used to looking at the world around you in a new way. Instead of taking for granted what's already here, we need to see what's not here, wonder why the hell not, and what we can do about it.

Business Opportunity

For example, how many times in your life have you seen a person using a walker? One hundred? One thousand? How many of those walkers had bright yellow tennis balls jammed on the bottoms of the back legs?

Seems like all of them do, doesn't it?

Do older ladies and gentlemen have a particular penchant for showing off their tennis ball collection?

Or maybe they like how the snappy fluorescent yellow hue brightens their somber gray walkers?

Or perhaps they were walking along, minding their own business when their walker's leg accidentally skewered an errant tennis ball, kind of like how a street sweeper might lance an empty water bottle on the end of his pointy stick.

And then they did it again on the other leg, too.

How many of these people just happen to have spare tennis balls lying around? And how did they puncture the balls so precisely that they fit on their walkers?

Clearly, these folks have made a real effort to install the balls.

So, here's the big question: If most walker users go out of their way to put tennis balls on their walkers, why haven't the walker companies figured out there's a business opportunity here and installed ball-like devices on the walkers to begin with??!!

Business Opportunity

Shhhh. Be very, very quiet. We're hunting ideas. And that's the sound of opportunity knocking. Listen carefully, or you might miss it. It's right there on the bottom of every walker you pass – a patent waiting to be filed, a product waiting to be designed, a dot com waiting to be purchased, a fortune waiting to be made.

If we find this one business opportunity staring us in the face on something we see all the time, imagine how many more opportunities are out there just waiting to be pounced on.

Ideas swirl all around us all the time. All you have to do is pay attention, separate the need from the noise, and start creating the solution.

And then, once you figure out what that solution could be, you have to strike while the iron's hot. Because as my dad used to say, “When a business opportunity knocks, you can't say, ‘Come back later.'”