Sometimes the choice of what business to put up depends on what resources you have in the first place.

For many entrepreneurs, this translates to location. After all, getting a perfect location for your ultimate business idea is next to impossible. So why not go the other way and first look for an available location… and THEN think of the perfect business to put up on it?

Quite a few successful net cafe owners, for instance, have found themselves running a thriving business simply because they stumbled upon an available business space that so happened to be situated near a school. And of course, what small business is more “in” these days when it comes to having a student clientelle than a net cafe?

One of our very first interviewees for SME Insight, John Decena of Hotshots Flame-grilled Burgers, found himself in a similar situation early on when he and his partners found themselves with an opportunity to make use of an empty lot in Pearl Drive, Pasig City, just across the University for Asia and the Pacific. With quite a lot of real estate at his disposal, he first envisioned having a number of stalls that would sell anything and everything.

At this point, the idea of coming up with a huge burger chain was not in his mind. What he really wanted was a lot of different tiangge-type operations there. But as it would turn out, much of their time ended up concentrated on perfecting a burger recipe, so by the time the lot was already made available, they had no choice but to put up their burger stand and concentrate on this first.

And ta-daah, the rest is history.

The point however is that the burger business was not really the intended outcome. The intended outcome was a bit more obtuse, but nevertheless a result of the opportunity that was made available (i.e. the large land). Fortunately, they managed to make a darn good burger and it took off.

While thinking of what kind of business you want to put up and finding ways to make it happen is the romantic ideal of what entrepreneurship is all about, many pragmatically-minded entrepreneurs tend to think in terms of seeing opportunities and making the most out of them. In other words, have resources and the business idea will follow. And of course, this includes the angle of location, location, location.

You can read about John Decena and the Hotshots story in the September-October 2006 issue of SME Insight.