“We didn’t know we were starting a business. We wanted to work on this problem and then people started to call us and ask us to help them with that same problem.”
This is how my wife’s uncle Glenn described to me the child development consulting business he has operated for more than twenty years. We were talking about how he built his successful business at a family reunion this weekend.
He told me, “We were lucky. If it had been ten years sooner, it never would have worked. If it had been ten years later, it never would have worked.”
I know several stories of lucky entrepreneurs that wandered into a thriving business.
But it’s not useful or accurate to describe all upswings in fortune as “just luck.”
What Glenn was describing with the traction he gained starting his consulting business was not luck, but timing.
When we think about markets, we often think in just three dimensions. We look at a market and assess competitors, products, and customers as if they were static things. But they’re not- they’re progressing through the fourth dimension of time.
Problems in markets tend to be clustered at the leading edge of where the market is evolving to next.
That Uncle Glenn was working on a problem that was affecting the whole market put him in that zone of evolution. The problem didn’t exist ten years prior and ten years later Glenn and others had solved it and were working on the next problem.
That zone of evolution is comprised of both problems and opportunities. If you’re too far ahead of it, there are no competitors/similar solutions and little energy for growth. If you’re too far behind it, there are too many competitors and it’s harder to win customers to drive growth.
What does your current level of competition tell you about where your business is in regards to how the market is evolving?
Featured image is the world’s oldest sundial, from Egypt’s Valley of the Kings (c. 1500 BC). Used under public domain.