Patient Opportunism

Good business opportunities are rare. The ability to take advantage of opportunities is even rarer.

On the other end of the scale are a lot of average to poor business opportunities.

This humdrum, day-to-day business is what allows you to pay your staff and suppliers to keep your business at that critical mass size necessary to take on more work.

I have seen good examples of this in some engineering companies. Most of the time they find long term assignments for their people at clients at a rate that is effectively salary plus on-costs plus a small margin. That is, they pretty much break even plus a bit.

This allows those companies to keep their staff busy ready for deployment on to larger projects. It also impresses potential clients when they see how many people work for the company (let’s leave out the fact that most of them can’t be redeployed rapidly to the client’s project – it’s a good image to have.)

Additionally, by having your people with different clients you will hear of good opportunities early and be in a position to make an offer to help.

This is a good overall analogy for business.  Sometimes simply staying in business is a valid business strategy. On top of this you add growth opportunities, and you position yourself through people, processes, physical capacity and money to take advantage of them.

Stick to your core business, but when an opportunity comes be prepared to quickly take it.