After many years in business, I’ve discovered that if you look for something you will always find it.

So if you look for all the problems and difficulties that massive change will bring your business then you will find lots of problems and difficulties.

However, if you look for all the opportunities that massive change could bring to your business you will find these opportunities as well.

It all depends on what you look for.

Here’s a great example of looking for opportunities when change happens:

The staff at the Ronttosrouva bakery in Helsinki, Finland found all their orders cancelled in March 2020 because of the Corona Virus pandemic.

The owners were wondering what would happen to their business and the seven staff they employed.

The future looked grim.

At the same time on TV you could see queues of people in Finland (and lots of other countries) panic buying things from their local supermarket.

And one of the things that people began panic buying was toilet paper.

This sparked the idea of a cake that looked like a toilet roll.

The staff at the bakery thought they could make a cake that was bigger than a roll of toilet paper yet would be delicious to eat.

(They thought a cake like this might bring a smile to some of their customers.)

The cake they created was made of oat batter, and passion fruit mousse and covered with white fondant.

And looked like a large roll of toilet paper.

They put out five of these toilet paper cakes and they sold within the first hour.

Then something unexpected happened.

People who bought the cakes began posting pictures of them to Instagram, Facebook and they told all their friends about these cakes as well.

Suddenly the toilet paper cakes (and the bakery) became famous.

The bakery now has hundreds of orders for these cakes and they have become so busy they have hired two new staff members to keep up with the demand.

The cake made people laugh and was a nice antidote to all the worry and fear around the coronavirus pandemic.

It was timely and bakeries around the world are now copying the idea.

And even turning them into cakes with messages for birthdays and so on.

There is a great 3-minute video on Finland

Bakery story at this link:

All the bakery did was notice an interesting opportunity in times of massive change and they took action on it.

Action Exercise:

What opportunities can your business take advantage of in times of massive change?