How To Easily Evaluate Business Opportunities

You’ve done it.

You’ve hit your stride and business is booming. You can barely remember what free time looked or felt like, but you’re ok with that.

If you’ve struggled with growing your business, this can feel like a welcome time of growth and opportunity. But eventually, you will need to get "picky" about your opportunities so that you can provide the best service. Now, it’s you choosing who fits your mission the best, instead of the other way around.

But how do you choose between competing opportunities? While it’s tempting to pick the business that will pay the most, that is only the tip of the iceberg.

I’m here to help you with a simple way to evaluate your opportunities in order to be the most successful.

First and foremost, it’s important that you are taking on work that exceeds your own terms of agreement. What goes into your terms? Consider how much time, energy, resources, money and sanity it will take to get the job done!

Will the time you need to spend take up every waking moment? Does the energy it takes surpass the reward you’re going to get in the end? Do you have the resources to complete the job? Is it going to end up costing you money, instead of earning it? And will the work you’re doing completely wreck your sanity?

Let’s be honest, we’ve probably all taken on work that meets the first few qualifications of these terms. But at the end of the day, we look back and realize that we nearly lost our sanity working with a certain coworker or business who sounded good in the beginning but ended up testing us at every turn.

If you’ve identified that your terms are set, it’s also important to ensure that those terms are less than your return on investment. What are you going to get out of this project? It has to be at the very least what you put into it to make it an opportunity worth taking.

Will the project also have future value? How will the work you’re doing now with a client benefit you in a year or two down the road? If you’re only taking work that gets you what you put into it, without anything of value in the future, it’s an opportunity you might want to consider passing on.

Perhaps one of the biggest items to consider is how will this opportunity impact your lifestyle. Will you need to sacrifice family or personal time? Do you have enough hours to allow for the new business? There’s nothing worse than taking on a new client, only to realize it’s going to take you twice as much time and energy that may not fit into your lifestyle!

Finally, does the opportunity at hand help contribute to your personal development, or hinder it? If you’re at the point in your career where you can choose clients and evaluate opportunities that fit your passion, it only makes sense that you ensure those same projects are in line with where you want to be.

I’m so happy you’re here, and I look forward to helping you on your path to becoming a high performer. Check out my services here.