Every day as a small business owner you have awesome opportunities presented to you. The best part is that you’re the one who gets to choose which of those opportunities you pick and which you let pass by. Do you have a system in place for evaluating them as they come or is it just by your gut? Let’s take a look at how you can analyze opportunities and make the most of them.
Opportunity
So what is an opportunity? Anything you make of it! But beyond the peppy talk, an opportunity is a chance to do something. It could be that you find another streamer who could become a great collaboration partner. It could be that a brand reaches out to you with a potential sponsorship or affiliation deal. Shoot, gaming companies give out free copies of their games to influencers all of the time. There’s a world of potential and it can be overwhelming to figure out what’s the best course of action.
Your best bet is to have a system in place that helps you analyze opportunities as they come in. The best time to develop that system was yesterday and the next best time is now yadda yadda wow I’m in a cliché-y mood. Anyways it really does help to have a framework you can fall back on that you don’t need to create in the moment. Calm, collected you is a much better decision maker than excited you.
Analyzing Opportunities
There are some common factors that you should think through for your business decisions. It’s up to you to weigh how important they are for you and to add others that you believe are relevant.
Magnitude
First, you want to look at the magnitude of the opportunity. How much could it return in the best, average, and worst case scenarios? How likely are those scenarios? These aren’t going to be easy questions to answer and you’re almost guaranteed to be at least partially wrong. That’s ok. The important part is taking some time to think through it. What could you gain from this opportunity and how likely are you to make that gain?
Time
Next, how much time will it take to implement? Some business opportunities involve clicking a button or signing a contract and making minor changes to your stream overlays. Some will involve hours and hours of work creating an entirely new show, promoting the show, and herding all of the cats that go in to co-broadcasting. Most opportunities fall in the middle. Figuring out how much time it will take is relevant for at least two reasons. First, it can help you see whether the project would run in to time you already had scheduled for other business or personal activities. The second is it can give you a sense of the cost to the business. You, the streamer, are the most important asset to your business. Everything that takes your time is expensive because it’s time you could be live or preparing to go live. Set an accurate hourly rate for your time and apply when considering our next point, cost.
Cost
Most opportunities don’t come for free. Besides the cost of your time there’s often cost in paying contractors, buying equipment, or an upfront fee to a vendor. Take some time to do a reasonably realistic accounting of the cost you’d expect to take on and compare it to your expected return. My exclusive, super pro tip: you want your cost to be lower than your expected return.
Uniqueness
You may want to consider the opportunity’s uniqueness. There are good and bad things about being unique that can play in to some of the above factors. If it’s unique and successful then it has the potential to be wildly successful. That can open up other opportunities you weren’t expecting, like consulting on similar projects. However, unique can often mean unproven. Unproven can mean a higher chance of failure since you don’t have anyone else to learn from. Unique also ends up meaning more time to implement since people aren’t familiar with what you need and you need to take more time to think through what you’re creating. Uniqueness is a magnifier of the other factors.
Partners
I don’t mean Twitch partners, I mean whoever you might work with on this opportunity. You should consider whether your potential partner, if you have one, will help improve the magnitude, time, cost, or uniqueness factors. After all, what good is a partner that adds nothing? You should also consider their past reputation. Are they known to be easy to work with? Penny pinchers? Scammers? Generous? People earn their reputation so you should consider reaching out to people you trust that have worked with your potential partner in the past. Additionally, search for them online and see what others are saying. We all know you can’t trust everything you read online but try to get a general sense of the feedback. Do your due diligence!
Happiness or joy
The final factor, which is incredibly important but non-monetary, is how much will you enjoy implementing the opportunity? Some opportunities might elicit a meh on the joy scale and a huge return on the magnitude scale. Some might be incredibly joyful but cost a fortune. You don’t want to just slave away for money at something you hate. After all, you play video games for a living. Come on, that should be fun!
One of the main reasons you want to consider the joy factor is that it can help change some of the other factors. If it’s clear that you love the project you’re working on or the sponsor you’re talking about then others are more likely to listen. That can amp up the magnitude of the opportunity. If you love what you’re working on then it can reduce the cost of the time because you aren’t worn out by doing it. On the other hand, if it’s something that you hate you see the opposite effect. Do not underestimate the importance of joy.
Conclusion
Take these factors, weigh how important they are to you, and set up a system that will help you analyze opportunities as they come to you. Please, please do this before you’re actually analyzing new business opportunities. I promise you that you’ll make better decisions if you are levelheaded when setting up your framework. Opportunities can be exciting and scary and you’re not making your best decisions when you’re excited or scared. If you have an opportunity that you’re struggling to analyze, leave a comment or shoot me an email and we can talk about it.
