When I started this blog as an experiment, I purposefully kept it vague, while maintaining a fairly clear industry-focus. However, taking a value-chain view of food & retail only gives you so much. It allows you to identify tensions and possible opportunities, but unless you want to be a consultant regarding value-chain issues or are the strategist within a business, it doesn't really bring you all that much.
Where the imagination really kicks in—and you need that to think of new business ideas—is when you start matching you— the individual or groups of individuals with a particular skill- and experience-set—with a particular opportunity that you can feel both passionate about, and confident that your skills & resources are sufficient to add value to it.
Blogging about FnR allowed me to look at segments in the industry, such as:
- farming
- supermarkets
- franchises
- online-retailers
- electronics retailers
- coffee-shops
- restaurants
- cinemas
- furniture-stores
- and fitness-studios
- fast-moving consumer-goods
- coffee
- beer
- private labels
- organic food
- and media
However, starting or working in a business is of course more than writing about it. It's the process of building up a vision, gathering up resources to execute it, and executing it. I was reminded of how powerful such a vision can be just last night when I was evaluating a business-idea and what it would take to execute it (I ended up dismissing it for now).
And of course, starting a business is not the same as running a business, the latter of which can be defined as a sustainable* process of making money (*: not in the environmentally-friendly sense of the word). So many stages to go still.
Will this have consequences for this blog? In the short-term, the next few months, probably not much. I'll still be looking at more industry-segments, product-areas, and business-issues. Ultimately though, I will have to focus on one particular industry-segment and one or a set of related product-areas. Of course, when that happens, I'll continue to share my thoughts here, as that is my not-so-secret way to build mindshare (insert: evil laugh).
Take care,
V.
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