At BrilliantRead Media, we always strive to bring to our community some of the meaningful and powerful stories from India and around the world to empower and motivate our community. This week we invited Richard Rothman – Founder and Managing Director of OpenMind Opportunity Consultancy Pvt. Ltd, for an interview with us to understand more about his journey so far. He is an Author – Speaker, Thought Leader, Coach, Advisor & Mentor to over 2000 companies in 67 sectors. His first book, Master Opportunities and Make it Big, won wide acclaim and was a national bestseller. His latest book, The Power of Opportunity, has recently been published by Penguin India. Let’s read about his inspiring journey!
Excerpts from our exclusive interview with Richard:
What is your new book ‘The Power of Opportunity’ about?
The Power of Opportunity presents a thorough methodology of thought and action on personal and business opportunities.
Why have you written a book about opportunities?
Because opportunities have tremendous power to change our lives for the better. They are the seeds from which all success grows. For example, a couple of years ago I met a 20-year-old entrepreneur, still a boy really, who had dropped out of college to develop an internet app. This boy, from a very modest background in Bihar, had managed to raise $20 million from Tiger Global, a major US venture capital firm.
This example highlights two fundamental things that give opportunities tremendous power:
1) All opportunities are free. You can’t pay for them even if you want to. There is no “opportunity shop” where you can buy them. That means that opportunities are available to even to penniless boys from Bihar.
2) The best opportunities are like powerful magnets that attract all the resources needed to scale them. Why had Tiger backed him? Was it because of his track record? Obviously not. Tiger was pouring resources into the opportunity, not the entrepreneur.
But resources flow only to the best opportunities, what I call golden opportunities. Therefore, it is crucial to consciously choose opportunities by using a systematic process, and not rely on luck, as most people do. Unfortunately, most people end up pursuing Nopportunities, which are not opportunities, because they don’t use a systematic process to choose them.
This is the second book you have written on an opportunity. How is The Power of Opportunity different from Master Opportunity and Make it Big?
My previous book, Master Opportunity and Make it Big, presented the stories of 18 “Opportunity Masters” who had started with nothing and made it big by taking advantage of excellent opportunities. Although all of these people had succeeded, they did not necessarily understand why. In The Power of Opportunity, I present a methodology of thought and action which is based on my experience with the over 2,000 businesses I have consulted with over the past 30 years as both an Opportunity Consultant and Trade Commissioner. Therefore, it is an original theory which I have developed.
Why are great opportunities crucial, and freely available to all aspiring entrepreneurs?
Business opportunities are created by a change in the environment. Although you can’t ‘manage change’ any more than you can control the monsoon, everyone can benefit from the opportunities created by change. All entrepreneurs, regardless of size, can harness the power of opportunities to become successful. Why? Because opportunities are all free, and freely available to everyone.
Even better, golden opportunities are like powerful magnets that attract all the team and the resources you need to scale. But to attract significant resources, your opportunity must be golden. Anything less than gold won’t cut it.
We live in a world of abundant opportunities. Still, many a time, we fail to see them and instead spend resources chasing ‘nopportunities’? Why do entrepreneurs often fall into this trap?
Studies have found that people are far more motivated to avoid losses than they are in making gains. Similarly, executives who have invested in ‘nopportunities’ will often spend time and money in a hopeless effort to turn them around. If you are constantly bailing out the lifeboat, the search for new and better opportunities tends to fall to the bottom of the priority list.
All business managers and owners are engaged in a constant battle, firefighting operational issues and solving problems. But as management guru Peter Drucker correctly pointed out, ‘Results are obtained by exploiting opportunities, not by solving problems.’ If possible, you should identify and dump hopeless nopportunities in order to give yourself more time to focus on opportunities.
What are the main criteria for evaluating opportunities?
Unfortunately, golden opportunities are not golden on the outside. They’re golden on the inside. That’s why you must choose opportunities very carefully. If you choose incorrectly, you can waste years on a Nopportunity, a concept that is not – and never will be – a golden opportunity.
Opportunities with all nine key drivers of value are more likely to be golden:
1) Opportunities should provide a useful service. Useful service is the key driver of value and is, therefore, more important than all the other evaluators.
2) Opportunities should be substantial, with large-scale potential.
3) Opportunities should be relevant – needed now.
4) Opportunities should be unique – those that are relevant but not unique are commodities.
5) Opportunities should be sustainable – difficult for competitors to copy or attack.
6) Opportunities should be accessible, with low barriers to entry, at least for you.
7) Opportunities should be suitable – align well with your mission, model, market and domain environments.
8) Opportunities should be actionable – feasible to execute at scale.
9) Opportunities should be profitable, with the potential to rank in the top 10 per cent of their category.
What are the best ways of spotting golden opportunities?
Consider the nine key drivers of value and imagine their opposites. Friction is the pain, dissatisfaction, unhappiness caused by declining utility, shoddy workmanship, inadequate service, win-lose value exchanges, and declining relevance.
Friction can be an immense source of golden opportunities. Why? Because friction inevitably causes pain and dissatisfaction. Other people’s pain can be your gain. Whenever you experience severe friction in your work or day to day life, you should ask yourself:
1) Is this something I care deeply about – enough to work on creating a solution?
2) Is this pain that I can remove?
3) Is this pain widespread? Could there be a big market for this solution?
To find friction in your industry, talk to your customers. Better yet, talk to your customers’ customers. What are they unhappy about? Examine what’s causing friction. Look deep into the whys and how’s. Then examine whether this is friction you can remove, through the application of effort and resources. Removing friction can pay big dividends.
For example, Netflix has captured two consecutive golden opportunities by identifying and removing increasing amounts of friction from its customers’ lives. When the company started, its main competitor, Blockbuster, created friction by forcing its customers to visit its retail stores to rent movies, and charging steep fees for returning DVD’s late. Netflix removed that friction by creating a subscription model that allowed customers to receive movies in the mail, and by eliminating late fees. When 3G bandwidth became widely available, Netflix used this opportunity to remove even more friction from its customers’ lives through the convenience of online streaming.
You’ve written that “opportunity is far too important to leave to chance. It needs a process.” How crucial is a process-driven approach?
Imagine how fearful you would be if you had to be operated on by a surgeon who had never performed the procedure before. If you are choosing opportunities without a process, that’s your situation. You’re flying blind and have every right to be fearful.
Systematic processes are the foundation of our modern world. The surgeon who uses a systematic process did not invent it himself. Rather, the process is based on the failures and successes of hundreds of surgeons who came before him. By using a tested process, the surgeon has a much higher likelihood of a positive outcome.
Similarly, if you don’t use a systematic process to see, evaluate and choose opportunities, you may be condemned to many extra years in the school of failure. Yet remarkably enough, 99.9% of Indian businesspersons choose their opportunities without using a systematic process.
Please explain the concept of Pareto Leaders and the need to focus on them to drive success;
The Pareto Principle, popularly known as ‘the 80/20 rule’, points out that 80% of results generally come from only around 20% of efforts. For example, 80% of your sales likely come from only 20% of your products. That 20 % of bestselling products are your Pareto Leaders. People generally focus on fixing what’s wrong rather than expanding what’s right. By identifying the Pareto Leaders in all areas of your life, career and business, you can focus on the skills, connections and resources that can truly drive your success.
What is the Opportunity Equation?
The Opportunity Equation is: Opportunity = Environmental Change + Valuable Adaptation.
Relentless change in our environmental constantly creates opportunities for us. What was highly relevant not so long ago gradually becomes less desirable. For example, smoking was once a very fashionable habit; now, it is considered to be socially unacceptable, and major tobacco companies like ITC must scramble to invest in different opportunities.
An adaptation is a modification that helps you (and others) to fit in better with a changing environment. An adaptation doesn’t need to be something new, i.e. an innovation. But it must be valuable to whoever it is provided to. An opportunity is an adaptation to change that creates a great deal of value for many people, as well as for you. For example, when Sunil Mittal introduced mobile phone service to Delhi, the technology was not new, but it represented a valuable adaptation for many customers who had never used a mobile phone before or didn’t have access to a landline.
Leveraging new opportunities entails embracing change and adapting to change invariably involves a certain amount of risk. How far is risk appetite an imperative for finding opportunities?
Having an enormous appetite for risk is not necessary in order to find opportunities and can be counterproductive. Risk takers often jump into new opportunities without proper thought or preparation. They’re fond of making decisions by ‘going with their gut.’ You can massively reduce risk by using a systematic process to see, evaluate, choose and implement opportunities.
Rule breakers and rule makers—why do they stand a better chance to adapt to change?
Rules dictate what you can or cannot do, think or believe. Many people and organizations are rule takers. They cling onto rules for too long as if they were natural laws. But since most rules are made by people, they are infinitely fungible and need to change to be relevant to the constantly changing environment.
In order to adapt better to the quickly changing environment, you can become a rule breaker and rule maker. By breaking rules, you can adapt and innovate more relevant solutions for human needs. This is a rich source of opportunity.
Could you explain the value dimension in the ‘opportunity’ context?
We pursue opportunities in order to increase value for ourselves, as well as for others. Most people think of value solely in terms of money, but in fact, a value can take many forms, and therefore there are many types of opportunities we can pursue.
Opportunities contain an only potential value. They are like the seeds that you plant that can grow into mighty trees bearing fruit. Just as a seed requires water and fertilizer to grow big, a nascent opportunity requires resources and effort in order to transform its potential value into actual value.
Why is it important to audit our opportunity environment?
Opportunities arise from changes in our environment. If our environment were totally static and unchanging, it wouldn’t contain any opportunities. Since all opportunities come from our environment, the more aware we are of it, the better able we will be to see, evaluate and choose the best opportunities.
An audit is a thorough picture of reality. When a CA audits a company’s accounts, he doesn’t just count half the money. In the same way, a company should regularly audit all four quadrants of its opportunity environment: mission, model, market and domain.
You’re the only Opportunity Consultant in the world, what exactly do you do or can do for corporations and for individuals.
As the first and only Opportunity Consultant in the world, I offer companies a systematic process to uncover, recover and discover opportunities for sustained, profitable growth. How am I different from other management consultants? Most follow the principles of the strategy developed by Michael Porter and others, which uses “competitive advantage” as the main filter through which to view opportunities. I’ve found that using competition as a filter can lead to increasing market irrelevance over time. After all, do your competitors buy your products? Are they part of your team? Of course not. I focus instead on providing useful service to stakeholders.
You have worked in India for the last 20 years, in terms of your specialisation (Opportunity) how has the Indian market changed? Are there more tangible opportunities at present then there were in the early years of economic liberalisation.
On a macro level, I firmly believe that India is the greatest land of opportunity in the world today. Half of India’s population are still subsistence farmers, a business model which is fundamentally broken in the modern age. Over the coming decades, they will move to cities and take better opportunities as wage earners and entrepreneurs. Since the demise of the License Raj in 1991, the Indian opportunities landscape has liberalized – but it still has a long way to go. The government has got to focus less on ideology and more on growth through opportunities.
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