Assessing the opportunities

You are faced with three opportunities:

1. A consulting project that involves a sector and approach which you have done before
2. A new advisory project in an area where you have wanted to work but where you will have to work really hard (and be lucky) to undertake it successfully
3. Joining a fast moving new startup in a totally new area where you will use some of your skills

How would you decide? What follow up questions would you ask? What would make you drop an opportunity (i.e. fatal flaws)?

I will tell you my first questions:

• What is my learning to pay ratio? I want to understand how much can I expect to learn about an area, skill or business model that I would pay for versus how much would I be paid. People often make an starker assessment, either they have to be paid immediately or they see ‘learning’ as a good that can’t be valued. I think valuing the learning is important, at least placing that learning in the context of what it adds to my capabilities. Attempting a valuation does not cheapen the learning but it can soften our rigid positions.
• Who are the people? The crew makes the project. Good crew makes a good project better, bad crew makes everything worse.
• How are people incentivised? The way in which people gain value from the project is good way to see how the project will be done. If the stock-standard project (opp. 1) is done by people who want to push the intellectual limits and build something special, then it can be a huge learning process (and you get paid!). The startup can be full of hype, where people aim for prominence and big pay-offs, the resulting being that the nuts and bolts of the startup are ill-attended . Often, the new project can be your own bad incentivizes, seeking to impress a group of people that you aren’t able (at this stage) to impress. Explore the incentives around you.
• Are you likely to succeed? At this point of my career, I have learnt plenty from failure but the lessons are generally ‘what I would I do different next time?’ It is an unfulfilling learning process. I think success, even on a small scale, teaches us about succeeding and what makes something successful. I had some early successes and those figure more into my day-to-day thinking than the raft of failures. If you have an opportunity to be part of a likely success, do it. Rarely do we regret success.

Those are my big questions for opportunities. Balance your learning vs. pay-off. Check out the people. See what people are looking for. Build success upon success.