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Opportunity (always) knocks

Colin Campbell
by Colin Campbell on 26/10/19 18:00
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Business development is a long held structural approach to increasing the revenue and activity of any business.

There have been business development managers in business forever (at least).

The concept of business development though and the business development of business development is something different again.

Recently on our TBOB (building the modern independent dental practice) course, Professor John Gibson did a session on leadership in which he touched up on the concept of the “external view”.

The “external view” is the ability to take yourself out of your environment to somewhere different and somewhere new, giving yourself the opportunity to look back to where you have been to see a different angle.

This creates a vision of opportunity and then an ability to select whether you wish to grab the opportunity with one or both hands.

Perhaps an example is in order here.

In Richard Rumelt’s book “Good strategy, Bad strategy” (which is one of the books we use on TBOB to introduce the concept of strategy planning) but is an anecdote about Rumelt’s time advising Steve Jobs on the strategy he implemented for Apple. This was not Jobs’ first time with Apple when he founded the company and produced growth to become one of the biggest developing computer companies in the world, this was after Jobs had been thrown out of his own company only to return after he had worked in different areas of the industry to see what was happening in the world of technology.

Rumelt will tell you that when Jobs returned back to Apple the second time, he shrunk the business massively, cutting the product line by hundreds to single figures and cut the staff accordingly only keeping the best ones. So when Rumelt asked him “what are your plans?” Jobs replied that he was shrinking down the company to allow it to survive to wait for the next opportunity.

When Rumelt asked him what that opportunity was likely to be, Jobs replied that he had no idea but that he knew that an opportunity would come.

Jobs took himself out into the world only to see a company as large as Sony playing about with technology for a digital music playing machine.

It was Jobs who saw the possibility of that machine, but he did not invent it.

He felt that if he could capture the technology in a handheld device to play music, it would change the world of computer interaction and it turned out that he was right.

The thing about business development is that you have to slay a few dragons and effectively pan for gold.

You also have to have the ability to pick more good opportunities than bad ones (but accept that you will pick some bad ones).

Last night I spent 40 minutes of a telephone conversation speaking to an artist from Scotland who is training to be a dentist. It was an extraordinary conversation and I was trying to find the opportunity for us to work together, because it will be brilliant.

We started on a small business development project to see whether we can get things off the ground.

Tonight I am meeting an ENT consultant to discuss other business opportunities and in the midst of this I try to fill a failure conference for the third time, which is unlikely to fill and will probably go down as one of my failures that I would ironically be able to talk about at a failure conference.

Not necessarily easy to say where the next big opportunity is coming from, but it will not be in front of your nose, in the room in front of you, sat in a dental chair (or anywhere similar).

 

Blog Post Number - 2167

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Colin Campbell
Written by Colin Campbell
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