Window of Opportunity.

Image source- johnmichaelmorgan.com

Today I was having some general discussion with my wife over breakfast. The discussion was mainly about how the startups can find any scope to do business when there are so many big giants-  corporates, businesses, companies have already entrenched themselves. How these small fishes can compete with the bigger ones.

Tapping a business opportunity in an environment wherein the existing space is already completely occupied by the big companies, is really a challenging task. These thoughts were lingering in my mind when I came across a story about Asian Paints, a listed and reputed company.

Before Asian Paints came into existence in the 1950s, paints industry was dominated by a few big distributors. They all simply neglected Asian Paints entry at that time. Asian Paints was trying to find its own window of opportunity form where it can enter this industry and cope up with the big players. 

It mainly found out two such windows of opportunity. One was in rural Maharashtra. Farmers in Maharashtra who own the bullocks used to paint their horns with different colors. For this, they needed a very small quantity of paints. But their problem was they have to buy big buckets of paints as the distributors that time didn't sell the paints in small quantity. Asian Paints tapped this opportunity and started selling small 50/100 ml sachets of the paints which became immensely popular in rural Maharashtra. 

Another similar window of opportunity tapped by Asian Paints was in Tamil Nadu. People there, as a tradition, paint the lower portion of the front doors of houses with different color stripe. And again their need for small quantity paints sachet was tapped by Asian Paints. 

Today, the total assets of Asian Paints are around $ 1000 million.

So, where is your window of opportunity?