Herman: John L. Herman Jr., Author

Opportunities in Troubled Times

Without a doubt the question that is asked more now than ever before is…”Where are the opportunities in these troubled times?” As though somehow there is a crystal ball to look into and find the nuggets of gold while the American economy tumbles down a hole.

OK, let’s have a discussion about this whole “opportunities” thing and let me give you the Herman take on it. While others blather about the obvious…that bank stocks have been hammered and are therefore a great “opportunity” to rebound, or that housing prices are collapsing and therefore you can buy a great bargain now because so many bankers will dump property so they can turn a piece of real estate into a pile of money, or that you could buy someone’s car cheap because they can’t make the payments on it anymore…I don’t want to simply tell people where the bargains, or opportunities are.

I live by certain beliefs and among them is that “power is something you take, not something you are given” and also that “you never get more than you can handle”…but when it comes to finding a business opportunity I believe with all my heart that there are zillions of them out there in good times and in bad…in fact let’s put it this bluntly, “most people wouldn’t recognize opportunity even when it hits them over the head!”

Let me be even more emphatic about this. In the best of times and the worst of times opportunity is all around you. You can only do one deal at a time and my company that specialized in handling financially troubled situations had more than we could handle regardless of the economy. Sure you may think deals are falling out of the sky when times are rough, but that also means getting money may be tougher, working with bankers who hate losing money means they don’t necessarily feel generous about giving you their old loan, and venture capital becomes vulture capital, so unless you have “cash” which always makes you “king” those opportunities may be out of your reach. In other words if they are selling dollar bills for seventy-five cents and you only have half a dollar you still can’t benefit from the troubled marketplace.

So, let’s make another Herman proclamation, “real entrepreneurs create or find their own opportunities.” Either you have a good idea, or you keep looking at enough situations until you see an opportunity. And the true entrepreneur keeps turning the deal over and over like it was a Rubik’s Cube until all the colors line up and you figure the puzzle out.

You can rationalize all you want but in business what life comes down to is this: find the other guy who is hurting and take him or her out. Trade on someone else’s loss and recognize that you didn’t cause it. Finding a business opportunity means many times exploiting in some way someone else’s situation, so if that makes you squeamish don’t get in the game. If you feel the need to overpay someone because it may mean they could lose everything they own, then please move on and skip the thought that you really want an opportunity, when what you want is a world where reality doesn’t exist. An opportunity doesn’t mean you have the only ice machine that can make snowballs in the summer heat, or the only hotel in town when the Olympics are coming, the marketplace will rush to fill those voids quickly. The real opportunity is buying that dollar bill for as little of your money as you can get it for.

Still want to know where the opportunities are in these troubled times? They are all around you.

• Posted: 13 February 2008
• Comments: 3
• Category: Starting a business

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