In 2013, I founded OpenMind, the world’s first and only opportunity consultancy. What is an opportunity consultancy?

An opportunity consultancy uses a systematic process that helps companies to uncover, recover and discover opportunities for sustained, profitable growth.

In other words, it helps companies to see, evaluate and choose their best opportunities.

Opportunities are created by changes in your environment. Therefore, to see opportunities, you must be fully aware of your opportunity environment. That’s why we start the process with an opportunity audit.

What is an audit? It is a complete picture of your environment. If you do a financial audit, you don’t count only half your money, you count all of it. In the same way, when we do an opportunity audit, we take a very expansive view.

Your opportunity environment has four segments: your mission, which is what you’re doing; your model, which is how you do it and who you’re doing it with; your market, which is who you’re doing it for, and your domain, which includes everything outside your mission model and domain that influences your opportunities.

Golden opportunities are rare and precious. If you want to find the golden needle in the haystack, it helps to first assemble all the hay in one place. By conducting an opportunity audit, we can create a very thorough opportunity inventory.

This includes all your internal opportunities in your mission and model, and all your external opportunities, in your market and domain. Your opportunity inventory includes opportunities you’re currently pursuing or thinking of pursuing, it includes opportunities you pursued in past but failed at but could recover.

It includes opportunities you considered in past but never pursued. It also includes new opportunities you never thought of before. Finally, your inventory includes nopportunities, which are false opportunities you’re pursuing now that are destroying value.

After assembling our opportunity inventory, we evaluate the opportunities to identify the best opportunities to pursue, or the worst nopportunities to reduce or eliminate.

By utilizing a systematic process, an opportunity consultancy can ensure that a company can always pursue the best opportunities that ensure sustained, profitable growth, while also consistently reducing and eliminating nopportunities that destroy value.