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Growth and direction · peer advisory council

Evaluating new opportunities

“A competitor wants to sell me their company. It feels like a great deal.”

What it often sounds like at the table

Owners are presented with opportunities constantly: new markets, acquisitions, partnerships, products, locations. Some are great, and some are expensive distractions. A council is built for this kind of question. A table of experienced owners will pressure-test your assumptions before you’re committed.

You might recognize this if…

  • You’re excited, and you haven’t run the numbers yet.
  • The opportunity showed up unexpectedly and comes with a deadline.
  • It would pull attention from what’s already working.
  • You haven’t decided who would actually run it.

Questions the room might ask you

  1. What has to go right for this to work?
  2. What are you saying no to if you say yes?
  3. Who runs it day to day?
  4. What would make you walk away?
How the council works on it

What happens when you bring evaluating new opportunities to the room.

  1. You put it on the table

    You lay out the situation in your own words, with the numbers and history that matter. Ten or so owners give it their full attention.

  2. Questions before advice

    The room asks questions like the ones above until everyone, including you, understands the real issue. Often that’s where the breakthrough happens.

  3. Experience, not opinions

    Owners who have faced something similar share what they did and what they would do differently. No competitors sit at the table, so nobody holds back.

  4. You make the call

    The group doesn’t run your company. You decide what to do, with a lot more perspective than you walked in with.

  5. Say it out loud

    You name your next step before you leave. Next month, the room asks how it went.

What you leave with

A clearer yes, no or not yet, and the questions to answer before you decide.

Bring this to the table Why it matters: Someone asking the question you haven’t asked yourself

Related conversations

Growth and expansionGrowth exposes what a smaller company could get away with.Strategic planning and executionThe hard part isn’t ideas. It’s choosing, and following through.Sales and business developmentSales trouble usually lives somewhere specific.

Prefer to work on evaluating new opportunities privately instead of in a group? I also do this one-on-one (opens JeffreyRands.com in a new tab).