Through no direct action on my part I was approached with a nice business opportunity. Another career consulting company specializing in helping legal professionals is looking to outsource some of their excess clients in the coming months as its their busy season. The company’s owner explained that since the legal job market is declining rapidly in this economy it has driven demand beyond what they could handle.
The business owner has attempted to work with other consulting companies in the past but because of bad results the owner has emailed my company along with a few others. He heard about my company through a referral from one of my past clients. But when he emailed me today I responded to his inquiry within minutes and we had a few back and forth emails since.
Is it pure luck or coincidence that I have been “handed” such a great opportunity?
I see it this way, that because I provide a quality service and have done so for more than three years its only natural that I will be awarded with a nice opportunity every once in a while. The right circumstances were there to begin with: country I was born, schools I attended, declining economy, etc.). I can’t deny that. But I believe this is true for any person who has achieved some success. If I were born in a developing country I might find business opportunities I never could growing up in the U.S.
Due to a combination of circumstances and my own initiative and persistence I will confidently say that I had a more direct impact on receiving this opportunity. For example, he sent the same email to other companies but I responded before any other one. That last detail is not a coincidence in that I happened to be online and have free time. But it’s because I work so many hours that the likelihood is that I am online and ready to answer any emails at a moments notice. This partnership is only in the beginning stages and nothing is guaranteed. But it’s not the first time I have had such opportunities.
Last year I was contacted by another startup job search engine company who wanted to refer potential clients for a commission. The company has grown considerably with an U.S. Alexa rank under 8,000 which means a considerable amount of traffic. We discussed the partnership for months and eventually I started receiving over 60 daily leads of people who had signed up to receive information about the resume writing service. But in the end it could not work as the potential workload would be too much for my one man company. Again you might call that luck but I would argue that since I have completed nearly 1,000 resumes and CVs in the past three years it’s only a matter of time that I did one for the right person that could help me.
I can refer to other examples where I was 100% directly responsible for receiving some cool opportunities such as proposing some article pitch’s to different newspapers and finally finding one that bit and wrote a story on my business. That story was read by another journalist who then approached me to write another article about my life and business in another more prominent publication.
But I am pretty certain both types of examples are a result of initiative. The people who achieve their goals are typically those who performed tangible actions rather than planning. Even if its likely to take ages before you reach your goal if you don’t start working towards it now you just might never. Even more important than that is that taking the initiative will lead you in new directions you may have never thought of.
Before I found out that I love to travel I already knew that the process of creating a business excited me. So I started some businesses, continuing with the ones that were successful and giving up on the ones that were not. As a result I have run one business since age 16 and another since age 19. If I wasn’t making much money at the time I continued with it regardless because I enjoyed the process of learning internet marketing, responding to customers, finding new products, and everything else that goes along with it. Even if I never made money I considered that it might help me develop new skills to start another one that could. It was always satisfying to know that whatever business
I was working on at the time might lead to some new path I had never considered. After 5 – 7 years old various businesses one huge benefit I never considered at the time was that creating a business might someday lead to me be able to travel consistently, which later became a huge interest of mine.
Whatever it is you find exciting I urge you to go do it. If you stop doing it after a few months you probably were never all that passionate about it anyways. It was just a fleeting interest. That’s because you were expecting to receive something rather than just enjoying the process. If you really enjoy what you are doing you will continue to do it because its your passion. I don’t think a passion has to be fun at all but it should bring you long term satisfaction. If you work hard and continue working hard on your project indefinitely, I think the opportunity you were never looking for will appear. And that opportunity will be so worth it.