Leaders See Opportunities
By Ernie Chen

The world is filled with opportunities just waiting to be found by opportunistic leaders. Leaders see opportunities in everything and never wait for opportunities to come to them. They create opportunities both for themselves and others continuously and consistently.

Leaders have positive mental attitudes, a desire to succeed, a determined mindset, and enthusiasm they can find, create, and take advantage of any possibility and any opportunity that they can dream. A dream is an opportunity when it is timely, attractive, achievable, fills a need, and provides value to the buyer of the dream. A dream is an opportunity only if there is reason to believe that the market will validate the dream and the leadership team has the ability to execute the idea. Many only dream of big and unrealistic dreams. Real leaders focus on business ideas must have a demonstrated need, ready market, and ability to provide a solid return on investment.

Opportunity-focused leaders start with the customer and the market in mind. They analyze the market to determine industry issues, market structure, market size, growth rate, market capacity, attainable market share, cost structure, the core economics, exit strategy issues, time to breakeven, opportunity costs, and barriers to entry. These are critical to the success on any new founded business opportunities. As they saying goes, business ideas are a dime a dozen. What matters most are the execution and the delivery team. It is not the idea. It is the people, and their ability to execute, that matters. Once we have the people and the execution, then the idea has the potential to become a true opportunity.

We must make personal development a priority so that we will be prepared to take advantage of the opportunities when it prevails. If we are not ready for an opportunity during the short window it will be there, it will pass us by.

We must be willing to accept mistakes at any opportunity that we make and must learn from them, and being willing to put ourselves out there to finding new opportunities through our mistakes. Each and every adversity that comes with it is a seed of equal or greater benefit. Through adversity, opportunities will come. This will be continuous and leaders will prosper in a world of growing and never ending opportunities.

Last updated - 28 February 2005