Untapped Opportunities for Entrepreneurs

culled from:inc.com


The Internet has transformed our lives in so many ways that it's almost impossible to keep track of the momentous changes. Things that we take for granted today would have been thought of as astonishing miracles just a decade ago. And no one expects the rate or volume of these changes to slow down any time soon. If anything, the rate of change will continue to accelerate because the growth of technology and amount of knowledge is increasing exponentially.

Part of your job as an entrepreneur--in addition to adopting, exploiting, and incorporating these massive changes into your company--is to try to make sense of their broader implications and the impact they will have. If you want to set your company apart from the pack, you need to develop systems that tap all the benefits of these technologies, including the human resources which are now available.

Hiring Good Workers--Wherever They May Live

If I had to choose the most important difference today in the way that we go about our lives and our businesses, it would be the way that technology has so radically changed the concept of "place" and the old-fashioned idea that any human endeavor today is location-bound or limited to a single geography. You can live virtually anywhere these days, and you can work productively from just about everywhere. Plus, you can attract, recruit, and employ people with remarkable skills from all across the world. (And, if you don't, you can be sure that your competition will figure out how to use this abundance of talent for their own benefit.) 

As a country, we're still very early into the process of outsourcing and, frankly, way too much of the emphasis to date has been on the potential cost savings instead of on the ability to pull in new resources and take advantage of new capabilities and brains. No one ever saves their way to success. Your own plan for the future needs to be wide enough to build on this global opportunity and also narrow enough to understand that the answers may just as readily be next door as in Nairobi. Because stay-at-home Moms, college kids, and others who are smart and willing--but still physically bound to a specific area--can all add enormous value to your business.

The Undervalued Older Worker

If I had to pick the second most important difference and opportunity today, it would be using new tech tools and extended Internet connectivity to unlock another vast resource: the still-vital skills and knowledge of our older citizens. Many of them are technically "retired" or otherwise unwillingly sidelined, but they still desire to be productive contributors to our economy.

Having gray hair doesn't necessarily make you wise, but it also doesn't mean you lack ongoing value, skill sets, and capabilities. As the classic expression goes: "the young people know the rules; the older folks know the exceptions." There's a reason we like to hire young carpenters, but old physicians. The burden is on you as an entrepreneur to extend and expand your ideas about where critical work can take place and by whom it can be profitably performed. (Perhaps some work could even get done in senior living facilities or retirement communities.) In the next few years, entrepreneurs can convert the old guard into the vanguard of a new push for increasing the utility and productivity of millions of older citizens.

The thought that simple age or a mere lack of digital facility is a disqualification for people with decades of institutional knowledge, great judgment, and extensive business experience is a foolish oversight that deprives our economy of important sources of skill and intellectual horsepower we need on the new global battlefields.