Types of opportunity

Leading on from what I learned from Prof Casson, I can advise that I also found there to be two main categories of opportunity. The first is your basic transactional opportunity. In this case these is demand and you see the opportunity to meet the demand with your supply, either directly or indirectly, and you do so. Deal done. In some cases this could be a business where it is a repetitive transactional cycle such as a supermarket. It could also be someone who only sells fire damaged goods, so although repetitive there is no predictability of supply. The other is where there is a demand and supply, but there is a lack of a market mechanism for matching supply to demand. A good example is SME finance. There is no shortage of businesses wanting funding. There is no shortage of finance available for lending. But it does not happen at the level it should, simply because there is no market mechanism. Supply cannot properly evaluate demand at a great enough volume to make the market function efficiently. Once this structural hole is filled the problem will be erased. So when looking for opportunities try and find the structural holes. They generally are also the more complex opportunities discussed in an earlier blog article.