Go Where the Gap Is the Biggest
The short answer
Point your next move at the widest gap you can find, before it turns into a crisis. Looking backward, that's an industry slow to adopt what already works elsewhere. Looking forward, it's a need that change is about to create. I've run the backward play twice, years apart, on purpose.
One instinct has run my whole career. See a real problem, apply engineering logic to it, then go find the technology that already works in another industry and bring it to the one that's behind. I call it a formula, and I've run it twice on purpose.
What did that play look like the first time?
In the late '90s I co-owned a manufacturer's rep firm with offices in Colorado and Arizona. The manufacturers I represented kept bringing me the same complaint: a fulfillment gap in the middle market that nobody had closed. A few niche players were doing supply-chain work, but nobody was doing what I came to call blind supply, where multiple hidden suppliers compete on a single buyer's order, each carrying a reliability grade.
I patented that idea, and then I built a business on it. I sold my position in the rep firm, raised money, and started EssentiaLink, one of the early B2B exchanges. We aimed it dead center at the laggard I knew best: medium-sized manufacturers in middle America, whose tool and maintenance catalogs weren't even digital yet. Later we added a managed services division that ran critical systems only. Our customers cut their maintenance and repair spend by 15 to 20 percent, and their systems stayed up. The company grew to around $10 million, almost entirely on referrals.
How did the same play show up years later?
When I joined OpticWise as CEO, it was a company that needed a refresh, and I came on for one reason: I could take proven technology to a lagging industry again. Commercial real estate was full of building systems that nobody was watching, controlling, or strategizing. I'd seen the shape of that gap before. We brought in the infrastructure discipline I'd learned elsewhere, and the payoff showed up where owners care most: lower operating costs and higher revenue, both hitting net operating income.
The industries were completely different, and the play was identical.
Is the gap always behind you?
No. The backward gap is the laggard: an industry slow to adopt what's already proven somewhere else. I want to be precise about that word. Manufacturing and real estate weren't backward industries. They were behind relative to what I happened to know best, which is exactly why I could see the gap.
The forward gap is a need that change creates before anyone fills it. Electric vehicles are heavier, so they wear through tires faster. The tire makers who saw that coming designed for it and sold more, because they solved the problem before it became a crisis.
How do you find your own gap?
Start with what you know cold. Your experience is a map of answers that already work. Then look for the places those answers haven't reached yet, and for the changes headed toward your customers that nobody is preparing for. The method for filling a gap once you find it is in No Unique Problems.
Point yourself where the gap is widest, and go before it becomes a crisis.
Where is the widest gap in your industry right now?
~b