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What Small Business Opportunities Does the Future Hold?

Written by: Candice - a freelance writer, jeweler, and digital marketing hybrid. You can learn more about her on her personal website or reach out to her on Twitter @candylandau.

The world is changing before our eyes

According to Pearson, in the 19th century, it took Britain 150 years to double its GDP per capita.

In the 20th century, it took the U.S. 50 years to do the same thing. And in the 21st century, it will take China and India just 15 years.

In a similar vein, where once it might have taken a few decades for a majority of the population to adopt something like the telephone or electricity, today adoption rates for consumer products like cellphones and the internet happen within five to 10 years.

Naturally, because the pace of technology adoption is speeding up, if you’re going to hold a competitive advantage in one of these areas, you’re going to need to be able to move fast and be able to meet demands as they increase.

Over the course of the next 20 years, the world’s middle class will increase from one billion to three billion, and become the most important economic and social sector in most countries. This means we should see a significantly higher demand for consumer goods and services. Small business opportunities, as well as bigger business opportunities, should abound. 

If you’re looking to be in business for the long haul, it can’t hurt to take these trends into account. How will they affect supply and demand? How will technology revolutionize our products and processes? What areas are ripe for disruption?

According to a report published by the World Economic Forum (WEF), some of the key demographic and socioeconomic drivers of change include:

Changing     work environments and flexible working arrangements

The rise of     the middle class in emerging markets

Climate     change, natural resource constraints, and the transition to a greener     economy

Rising     geopolitical volatility

New     consumer concerns about ethical and privacy issues

Longevity     and aging societies

Young     demographics in emerging markets

Women’s     rising aspirations and economic power

Rapid     urbanization

And, according to this same report, key technological drivers of change include:

Mobile     internet and cloud technology

Advances in     computing power and big data

New energy     supplies and technologies

The     “Internet of Things”

Crowdsourcing,     the sharing economy, and peer-to-peer platforms

Advanced     robotics and autonomous transport

Artificial     intelligence and machine learning

Advanced     manufacturing and 3D printing

Advanced     materials, biotechnology, and genomics

Consider how these changes will affect the industry you’re interested in, or what opportunities they might present.

For example, flexible working arrangements may well mean the rise of coworking spaces (either for individuals, or whole companies) and increased demand for space and power outlets in coffee shops. So, starting a cafe business or a coworking space might just be a great idea. Rapid urbanization also presents another good opportunity. With more people flocking to work in cities, the need for affordable housing will rise. This means real estate firms and construction companies are probably going to do well. It also means there are going to be big environmental risk factors. You could either specialize and become a “sustainable developer,” or become an environmental impact assessor. It might also be a great time to go into law, or to open a legal practice, perhaps specializing in compliance and commercial law.

The rise of and our dependence on smart objects, aka the “Internet of Things” (think smart thermostats, wearable fitness devices, and built-in sensors for just about everything) will not only unleash a huge amount of data about how we live, but will open up opportunities in semiconductor and software fields, as well as areas related to information privacy, security, and systems integration.

According to research by The McKinsey Institute, the “Internet of Things” has a potential economic impact of $4 trillion to $11 trillion come 2025. In this study, they map out some of the key areas where value may accrue. It’s worth looking into. 

Another great opportunity is represented by the rise of the sharing, or the collaborative economy business. Today, companies that operate within the collaborative economy model enjoy immense success and an ever-expanding user base. This has largely been enabled by the internet, which has in turn allowed for the creation of sites like AirBnB that allow anyone to list their apartment or home online and offer it up as a vacation rental, or of course that allow people to book a taxi from on app on their phone, wherever they are.

These companies and companies like them have already disrupted marketplaces (like the taxi industry, in the case of Uber and Lyft) and will continue to do so moving forward.

How business is conducted is changing, and if you’re not willing to adapt, you may be left behind.

Being future-oriented isn’t rocket science

Beyond hypothesizing about how the world will continue to change, there are many annually published reports you can turn to to find out what is actually changing now.

Each year, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes a list of declining industries, many of which fall within the manufacturing sector. When you think about it, this is hardly a surprise given the affordability of having products manufactured overseas instead of on U.S. soil.

It also can’t hurt to keep an eye on the Bureau’s fastest growing and fastest declining occupations. This will give you a close-up on the bird’s eye view.

For example, one occupation in high demand—wind turbine service technicians—perfectly illustrates the growth of the engineering and alternative, clean energy sector.

Cross reference these lists with the list of declining industries, and you’ll rapidly start picking out the patterns.

Skills for the future

The U.K. government published a paper in July 2014 that compiled research findings from a number of U.K.-based research institutions. The paper, entitled The Labour Market Story: Skills for the Future, addressed those skills that will be in demand in 2022, including emerging skills and how these relate to jobs.

Naturally, any studies predicting what the future holds should be taken with a grain of salt. They are still predictions, and unseen market forces and technologies might just as well disrupt an industry seemingly on the rise.

That said, the findings show that employment share in the primary and utilities, and manufacturing sectors is projected to fall, while employment in construction, trade, and accommodation and transportation will grow most between 2012 and 2022.

If you’re keen on starting a construction business now, you may just reap the rewards later. However, if you’re thinking about setting up a manufacturing business, you might want to look into whether or not this is really a good small business opportunity for the long term.

Naturally, these statistics do not take into account those factors that could disrupt these predictions, so don’t be put off if you’ve got the drive and great ideas.

Findings from this same paper show occupations on the rise, including managers, professionals, associate professionals, caring, leisure, and other. Skills related to operating within these professions will also be on the rise.

In general, people with a broad range of “generic skills” will be highly prized. This includes skills related to problem solving, communication, teamwork, and information and communications technologies.

Even if you don’t plan to be working for someone else come 2022, it’s worth making sure you’ve got the skills to move your business into the future.

Many countries and independent institutions publish reports of a similar nature, either lists of skills that will become more important in the future, or the in-demand university degrees. Pay attention to these reports, as they are indicative of larger trends and needs in the marketplace.

At the end of 2014, The National Association of Colleges and Employers released data gathered from 260 companies and organizations. Based on the data, they were able to compile a comprehensive list of bachelors, masters and doctorate degrees in demand. The top three bachelors and masters degrees included finance, accounting, and computer science. The top doctorate degrees were all in the engineering and sciences fields.

  Posted by David Seagraves                                                            

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The Best Way to Avoid Your Next Business Disaster

Written by Jenn Steele is director of product marketing at Indix, a product intelligence platform that helps ecommerce businesses make smart product decisions.  

What do you do when things in your business go exactly opposite to plan? If your launch goes splat or the marketing campaign that was supposed to make the hockey-stick happen falls on deaf ears, you may find yourself wondering where exactly everything went wrong. Unfortunately, many businesses simply charge ahead to the next project rather than diagnosing what happened, which significantly increases their chances of the next big project going splat too.

Instead of charging forward and risking another disaster, many businesses would be better served by taking a couple of days to think about and diagnose what happened. Based on my own experiences with ho-hum launches and ugly rollouts, I’ve come up with a simple framework for disaster diagnosis. While I’ve used the 5 Whys before, I find that this framework digs deeper into the disaster, helps identify problems with both strategy and execution and produces more effective learnings and action items.

One caveat before we look at this framework -- the beginning steps of this process will be massively frustrating at first for people who identify more as “fixers” than “understanders.” Fixers are people who get most of their professional satisfaction from jumping right in and coming up with solutions, versus understanders who get more satisfaction from understanding how every piece fits together. Because I am a fixer myself, it took me a very long time to see the value in suspending my problem-solving mode until we wallowed in the problem for a bit.

With that caveat out of the way, let’s look at the six-step process that will help you diagnose a disaster:

Step 1: What happened?

Without agreement on what exactly happened, your diagnosis won’t get anywhere. Even if your process starts with an email from your CEO that says, “Hey guys, the bobby sock marketing campaign isn’t getting any press. What happened?” -- your stakeholders still need to agree that the problem was with the bobby sock campaign and that the fundamental issue is lack of press, rather than lack of adoption. In other words, you need the problem statement.

In this step, you need your stakeholders to agree on the problem statement, and define the gap in the metrics between what you expected to happen and what actually happened. Of course, you may discover that you never set clear objectives and metrics to start with, which you should remember for step four. However, for an example with metrics, your bobby sock problem statement and metrics might read something like, “We launched the bobby sock marketing campaign, and it fell short of our expectations. We expected a 10 percent month-over-month increase in site visits, a 10 percent lift in inbound leads and three press write-ups. We saw a two percent month-over-month decrease in site visits, zero lift in inbound leads and only one press write-up.”

Step 2: What did we do?

The second step is to figure out how you executed the project, and make sure everyone in the room understands the steps that lead up to it. Things can get a little touchy at this step. To try to avoid shouting matches, don’t talk about what process you were supposed to follow -- document what actually happened. This isn’t a time to start pointing fingers or talk about why your original process broke.

You may want to appoint a moderator who can stop the conversation when it gets heated or moves into how the process broke. You’ll also want internal teams to prepare for this in advance. Coming into this meeting with timelines that your teams prepared separately in safer environments can make this step move quickly. At the end of this step, you want a simple narrative or timeline of what happened when. To continue our bobby sock example, you might have a timeline from marketing leading up to launch that shows all of the key events, like when the PR agency became involved and when the ads launched.

Step 3: Who was involved?

In this step, you’re simply listing what teams, contractors and agencies were involved with the disastrous project. These should ideally map to each item in step two. If they don’t, you may have missed items that belong in your step 2 list. Be very careful not to point fingers or start playing the blame game; this is merely a list of who did what, and you don’t want to miss anyone. If you have a moderator, he or she can help ensure you stay on-topic. Because you have a high-level timeline from step 2, this may be very simple to execute.

Step 4: What broke?

Now that you know the what, when and who, you can finally start talking about what went wrong with your strategy and/or execution. What false assumptions did you make? What balls did you drop? How did the actual timeline differ from the project plan? Who did we forget to involve? What external factors influenced the disaster? Assuming you reached an agreement fairly quickly in step 1, this will likely be the longest step of the meeting.

This step can be cathartic to both fixers and understanders -- fixers because we finally feel like we’re getting to something that we can fix, and understanders because you’re finally getting to the root of the problem. Unfortunately, this step can also be wildly contentious, since some people in the room might start pointing fingers. It can be helpful to have the moderator lead the discussion by stepping the team through the timeline or starting with a brainstorm and interrupt when things start getting out of hand.

At the end of this step, you want a point-by-point breakdown of everything that broke in the process, even if you only discovered that it broke given later information. You also want to avoid documenting how to fix each step (frustrating for folks like me, but necessary). Going back to the bobby sock campaign, you might express one of the broken execution steps as, “We learned after launch that our PR agency needed a four-week lead time, but we only gave them notice two weeks before,” or one of the broken strategy steps as, “We made our primary focus getting support from analysts when we should have focused on telling stories through media.”

Step 5: What could we have done differently?

Here is where the fixers can finally breathe a true sigh of relief, since it’s finally time to start talking about fixing the problems. Your goal in this step is to address each point in step four with what the stakeholders agree that you could have done to keep things from breaking. In the bobby sock campaign, addressing the point above about the PR agency lead time, you would see something like, “In order to give the PR agency a four-week lead time, we could have started on the messaging two weeks earlier.” While this will be less contentious, you probably still want to have the moderator around to keep things from degenerating by reminding everyone that hindsight is 20/20.

Step 6: What needs to change moving forward?

Finally, you’ll create a list of action items and process changes that will hopefully keep you from having future disasters occur in exactly the same way this one did. Each item should address one of the points in steps five and six, have a defined owner, have a due date, and have a channel by which the owner will communicate completion or questions with the team (e.g., slack channel, email or follow-up meeting). Once you have all of the changes and reporting defined, everyone can finally leave the room and get a much-needed drink!

Be warned, however, that you may not end up with any sort of action items as a result of this process. This doesn’t mean that the diagnosis has failed; it means that, despite your best efforts, your project didn’t perform up to expectations. While this is rare, you should accept it, move on with your business, and keep in mind that flops happen sometimes.

Disasters are never fun, and emails from your CEO asking you about them are significantly less so. Stepping through the diagnosis will probably be contentious and painful, since no one ever likes to dwell on failure. However, going through the process and making changes to your future strategy and execution can keep disasters from happening quite as often.

  Posted by David Seagraves                                                                                          

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