The secret of success? According to twice British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli the secret is to be ready for your opportunity when it shows. Are you already dreaming of a small business opportunity? Don’t dream anymore. Seize it. It’s now before you.
“Every man has one chance in his life to make a fortune,” Horace Greenley, founder of the New York Tribune, used to say. Inspire yourself with this.
Some small businesses are slow in rising. Little cash, few resources, these block their growth. Far more than anything, however, it’s the owner’s apathy for opportunities that keeps that small business from gaining the necessary momentum to bust through a blockade. In other words, routine and hesitation kill a small business opportunity in its crib.
What’s The Story Behind Exploiting A Small Business Opportunity?
Take some juicy lessons from the following man to keep apathy from snuffing the life out of your small business opportunity. His name was Samuel.
Samuel had few resources but one chance for success. And he didn’t blow it either by following routine or by being afraid of his ignorance, lack of support or other limitations.
He came from a religious background, his father having been a preacher. He spent 3 years in Europe learning to become a professional artist. For 10 years he specialized in portraits.
While in college he also took some courses on natural sciences and chemistry.
On a trip back from Europe, this bit of extra knowledge gave him an edge when listening to a conversation about some French scientists and their experiments with electromagnetism. The little that he understood from them completely enthralled him.
Rather than lose a good opportunity by dismissing this new gained knowledge as just a passing fancy, Samuel ruminated a thought in his mind. He began to think big. This is behavior to imitate if you want to be ready for a small business opportunity and success when it shows up as it to him.
He had learned that electric shock waves could move all around a large room from one end of a wire to the other end instantaneously. What could he do to make use of electricity this way? How could he harness electricity in motion through a wire to help people?
1. A successful small business opportunity always focuses on benefits to a neighbor.
He thought for some time until he resolved in theory that if a pulse of electricity could move throughout the entire wire in one direction, then it might be possible to make an electric signal visible at any point along that wire. If the signal could be made visible, then “I see no reason why intelligence might not be possible to transmit instantaneously by electricity.”
This is how Samuel Finley Breece Morse saw his opportunity.
Locking himself immediately in a cabin, Morse combined his old understanding of chemistry with his artistic abilities to complete a drawing with explanations about the interplay between magnets, wire, and electricity to communicate ideas across long distances.
2. A chance to change the entire way that the human race communicates doesn’t appear very often. This is why it’s critical to seize opportunity when it does show up.
It showed up for Morse for just an instant. He seized the opportunity by recording it with the strengths that he had literally in his hands before someone else could do the same. Do likewise because he also had many competitors who would have exploited the very same idea promptly and ahead of him otherwise.
But don’t stop here. It is not enough.
Use What You Got, Don’t Bemoan What You Lack
Remember Morse was a painter not a scientist. Yet for 3 years he worked perfecting a machine while serving as Professor of Painting and Sculpture at New York University, where he ended up exhibiting his creation. He received lots of applause and compliments for a fascinating idea and an intriguing machine.
But none dared risk any capital behind it to make it a practical enterprise. After all, to take off a small business opportunity requires more than elbow grease. It requires risk-taking. Be prepared to confront your fears, therefore.
Morse made a bold move to secure a large grant from Congress, by performing many commercial and public demonstrations to academia, members of Congress and the presidential cabinet.
3. A small business opportunity requires bold marketing.
His request was rightly found at the time to have been unconstitutional to fund. Yet his insistence secured him about $1.2 million in today’s currency, of which he wasted 75% trying to work an underground wiring system that horribly failed. He was desperate and about to go broke.
4. Desperation motivates an entrepreneur both to find alternative ways to exploit the small business opportunity and to remain focused.
No doubt in his worse moments Morse remembered why he had undertaken his small business project and why he couldn’t just abandon it.
Exploit The Opportunity With A Motive That Transcends You
Here’s why Morse never stopped. While away painting a portrait in another state, Morse received news by horse messenger that his beloved wife was ill. Leaving immediately he arrived only to find that she had been dead and buried for days, having died alone. He was 34. Since then his ambition became to find a way to deliver long distance messages fast. He remained focused on his pursuit.
In his distress with the failing venture, Morse also sought the help of an old acquaintance, a potter’s son and carpenter, Ezra Cornell, who eventually went on to found Cornell University.
At the time, however, Cornell was just a 35 year-old ploughs salesman, whose experience with farming tools helped him redesigned a plough to help Morse lay down cable underground more efficiently.
The technique worked but not the underground technology that Morse had devised.
The small business opportunity was about to go extinct, had it not been for Cornell’s fresh advise to hang the wire from poles rather than continue ineffectively laying it underground, which saved the project and the telegraph venture from failure.
5. Small business must diligently keep an operation simple to keep it also economical, mitigating enough risks thereby to improve the possibility of success.
Then success finally struck on May 24, 1844, when Morse telegraphed a politically significant news to his project sponsors in Washington DC across scores of miles of hanging wire. That sealed his destiny. Morse and his telegraphic code became superbly famous worldwide for generations.
Cornell ended up making millions by constructing telegraph poles and hanging wire throughout the land, and by founding the gigantic Western Union Company. A small business opportunity became a big business.
What small business opportunity can you turn into a great success by imitating some of the great entrepreneurs in history? How will your storyline read 30 years from now?