Innovating through pain
How to turn a crisis into an opportunity?
Stabilize first; then notice what changed in the market, what people now need and what you learned. Opportunity is a way of looking, not luck.
bairogonzalez.com team, drawing on Bairo's story · Published
"Crisis is opportunity" is a phrase that annoys anyone in the middle of one. When there isn't enough money for the month, no one wants to hear about opportunities. And rightly so: before seeing any door, you need to be able to breathe. After that, yes, it's worth looking with different eyes.
What to do now
- Stabilize before seizing opportunities. Secure the basics: a minimum income, essential bills, health. No one can see an opportunity while drowning.
- Ask what has changed. Crises change habits. Are people buying differently? Needing something they didn't need before? Distrusting something they used to trust? A change of habit is room for something new.
- Look at what has been left without an owner. When companies close or pull back, customers are left unserved, regions are left without services, problems are left unsolved. Someone will take that space.
- List what the crisis taught you. Negotiating with creditors, cutting costs, selling in hard times, leading under pressure. These skills are worth a lot, and few people have them.
- Test cheaply. Before investing, sell the idea to a few people. Offer the service, run the pilot, listen to the reaction.
- Be wary of "opportunities" that come looking for you. In a crisis, promises of easy money, "can't-lose" investments and referral schemes appear. A real opportunity usually takes work and doesn't ask for money up front.
- Get support. Sebrae, business associations, free courses and entrepreneur groups help turn a hunch into a plan.
When it happened to Bairo
Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez's path has a turning point that was born of crisis. He says that, after going broke, with many people depending on him, he decided to do something he didn't know how to do: build a currency, a bank and a network. It went wrong. He kept going.
What he takes from it is a lesson about timing. The artificial intelligence idea he had abandoned years earlier showed what happens to those who arrive too early: they end up alone. The crisis, for him, taught him to watch the market's clock, and not only his own will.
In his telling, the word that explains the turning points is not luck. It is timing.
The path
Opportunity is rarely a stroke of luck. It's an eye trained by pain. In Bairo's story, the eye came from the falls. The crisis you're going through is training your eye too. When the worst is over, use what you learned to see what no one else is seeing.
It doesn't need to be a big turnaround. Sometimes the opportunity a crisis offers is small: a new customer left without a supplier, a skill you learned the hard way, a partnership that only came about because everyone was in the same squeeze. Add up those small opportunities over months, and they can change the whole course of a life.