Business Opportunity Identification Skills for Christians

ZBIN has been invited by a leading Pentecostal church in Zimbabwe to carry out a business/investment presentation-what an honour! We have been given a total of 3 hours to carry out a presentation and facilitate discussions on business and investment opportunities and agreed to participate.

We are therefore putting together a presentation and training material for this event and decided to share some of the material that we will present with you so that this can help churches in areas where ZBIN is not able to visit.

So what do we intend to achieve at this event?

1. To equip church members with key business opportunities identification skills.
2. To enable the church to collectively take advantage of emerging opportunities.
3. To help the church in taking advantage of an identified business opportunity

So we are looking at a church member as an individual and exploring how one can be an expert at identifying business opportunities. Equipping one with basic skills which are not covered anywhere….not even at college level! We would like to see members with a competitive advantage when it comes investment opportunity identification.

The objective of the presentation can be summarised as ‘Creating a culture of business opportunity identification’. They have to master and enjoy business opportunity identification and in next instalment we will talk of ‘Taking advantage of business opportunities’. The follow up discussion may take place in 6-8 months’ time but for now they need to be experts on an individual level and collectively as a church.

So at individual level, how does one identify opportunities? Is it Rocket Science? The answer is No; this is something people do every day, we will just make it systematic so that one can do it in an organised way.

Business Identification Skills at Individual Level

1. Positive Mindset: Identifying opportunities starts in the mind, if you train your mind to only see negatives then negatives is what you will see. If you train it to see positives so positives is what you will see. We will provide reference to an article we posted here on the power of the mind in business.

2. Whats New in Town: Easiest way to identify new opportunities- What is New in Town? Is there a new surbub that is being built? Who will provide construction of roads? Who will build houses? Who will provide materials for building houses? Who will provide the residents with retail shops, who will educate the children of the suburb? New in Town concept can be applied to new political parties, new government policies or initiatives, new organisations. This is a high risk area as you are likely to find opportunists and fraudsters.
3. Problem Solving Mind set: The simplest opportunity identification concept. You just need to list all problems that people are complaining about. You list them down and try and find innovative solutions to the problems. Opportunities will emerge as you try to solve them. I have a friend who has created a company that will try and fix the pothole headaches. The import substitution (SI 64) resulted in uproar last year but local companies benefited to some extent from the move. So if you were prepared, this as the time to benefit by increasing local production! When some were complaining about the introduction of the Bond Note by initially refusing transactions in the Bond, at ZBIN we encouraged members to accept and increase sales! So simply list all the problems that people are experiencing and find how best to solve them. The list should always be updated on a regular basis.
4. Import Substitution: What are the goods and services that we are importing? Why are we importing them? Does it mean there is no substitute? At one time Zimbabwe was importing mineral water! We were even importing charcoal and goods which were easily found locally! During the week, a key topic on our Facebook Page was that of food vending carts which have a current price of R20,000 in South Africa. Zimbabwe can produce similar food vending carts at less than half the price and create local opportunities.
5. Franchise Analysis: One can easily visit franchise websites such as www.franchisedirect.co.za/, www.safranchisewarehouse.co.za and https://whichfranchise.co.za. Franchise sites provide you with a list of new opportunities which will be for sale. So you can always visit and find what will be new as franchise websites usually capture new opportunities.
6. Comparisons: When we visited Mozambique last year for the first time, we identified opportunities by asking simple questions. We asked why there were few boats on the Zambezi River, we asked why there were no fruit and veges markets? We asked why South Africans were building shopping malls. We compared Tete to Harare, we compared Tete to Johannesburg. We asked why we did not see schools along the Nyamapanda to Tete Road when we had seen several schools along the highway from Harare to Nyamapanda, so where were the schools? In comparing we realised that there Is a market for schools that teach the expatriate community in Mozambique, Zimbabweans working in Tete needed schools that teach the Zimbabwean curriculum. We asked why the temperatures were so high when compared to Harare and realised that there was a market for ice creams. So when you keep asking and comparing you actually come up with a lot of opportunities.

We have 8 more tips to share with them and this includes disruptive technology. In order for one to be effective in identifying opportunities you are going to need the following skills:

• Interest in finding opportunities
• You must enjoy sharing your thoughts with others
• Utilise your research skills
• Be well read
• Not have a get rich quick mentality

Follow up Steps

Business Committee to cultivate the spirit of identification opportunities and sharing amongst themselves. Through discussions, they can actually identify church members with opportunity identifications skills; these will be called Opportunity Identification Champions who will work closely with the Business Committees in identifying opportunities for the church.

Follow up on investment opportunities: Identifying opportunities is part 1 and is not enough, following up on opportunities and coming up with action plans is the ultimate objective.

Use of Professional Market Survey Reports: Identifying opportunities at an individual or collectively as a church is good but for decision making they will need to use market survey reports which cover more information.

Zimbabwe Gap: ZBIN has identified a gap, an interesting one for this church; unfortunately it will only be shared with this church. We will feature it as one of our success stories if the church follows it up – the idea will be for free and we hope by end of year, something new and exciting business wise should be happening in Zimbabwe.

We will share with them a lot of materials we have published including some discussions done on our Facebook Page. This is an extension of our community service as we try our best to develop a community that is talented in identifying opportunities in Zimbabwe and beyond, a community that takes advantage of opportunities in an ethical manner.

For us identifying opportunities is a God Given Talent and there is no better way to utilise it than to spend 3 hours of our time discussing business and investment and helping to inspire them to take advantage of existing or emerging opportunities.