Adventure Capitalist

I have done projects for a number of businesses over the years as a freelance consultant, and a realisation has slowly dawned on me:
Most information/technology businesses are actually not experts in their chosen market/domain in the strictly technical sense - I’ve done work for numerous businesses who where appalingly bad at actually executing and delivering on what they where supposed to be experts in.

In other cases they may not have been so bad, but their pre-existing infrastructure and preparedness to execute and deliver was little better than if a couple of reasonably experienced guys in the field walked in off the street and decided to set up shop together.

It’s about sales and aggregation
How can this be? Are businesses really that poorly prepared? I wouldn’t say it’s an indictment of businesses or business practices in general, it’s just that most people have the wrong idea about what a business really is.
I’d say most successful businesses above all are built up of a sales organisation that sees opportunities and pounces on them to sell something. Second to that is the capability to quickly put together teams around opportunities to deliver on them.
Everything else is secondary: it’s about seeing opportunity, selling the opportunity to someone then putting together the skills necessary to actually make the opportunity a reality. The dirty little secret is that everything else is just smoke and mirrors. Large organizations become dysfunctional when they forget about this, something which happens easily when the people in charge are not longer the opportunists and entrepreneurs who set things up: people start to want to build up in-house “capabilities” in terms of large teams that need to be kept busy, but being busy is not the same thing as being productive or useful. And this is the point when costs and overheads start going off the rails while the “Not-Invented-Here” syndrome becomes rampant..

The lesson for the little guy/entrepreneur
Most people will get scared off if they have a business idea in an area where some big guy is already staking his claim. Maybe there isn’t as much cause for this: in terms of technical execution, you are almost on an even footing with them if you have the domain expertise.
Your primary weakness compared to the 500 pound gorilla will be your sales- and marketing muscle. But when it comes to pure execution and delivery, you might even have a leg up on larger competitors, as you are likely to be less bound by institutionalised waste, incompetence and counter-intuitive “processes”. If you can learn to aggregate the know-how, skills and sales/marketing capability to work without these weaknesses of your larger competitors, you stand more than a fighting chance to carve out a profitable niche for yourself.