When there is any major trend, smart entrepreneurs and established business leaders alike look for opportunities and the current focus on health is not only serving to slim down American waistlines, it has the potential to fatten up profits for a wide variety of companies.
In the world of diets and health, it can be difficult for average consumers to easily get the kind of foods and ingredients they need. Americans are pretty famous for having a rather large sweet tooth, but creating sweets that adhere to the specific dietary guidelines isn’t such an easy task, so there’s opportunity there.
Stephen Charles Lincoln, who founded The Protein Bakery in New York back in 1999, recognized the same thing but was inspired by different diet and health trends. He saw that the personal fitness, personal trainer and gym-membership movement created demand for high-protein products and later moved into the gluten-free, sugar-free and vegan flavor profiles as well.
The upside of marketing to these trends is that the playing field is, at first, relatively uncrowded. The downside is that many trends have a natural lifecycle and someday they start to wind down or at least level off. However, if there is a broader general category of your product or service – and the examples here have been healthy food items – you can pivot to some degree, as Lincoln has done by moving into new niche markets where customers are seeking snack options.
If you don’t want to bet everything on a rising trend, find a way to work with someone who is! What service or product can you provide to startups that are looking to ride the next big wave to sweep through a consumer market? Perhaps you can tweak your pricing or the ways you serve clients in a way that benefits these kinds of startups and establishes their relationship to and reliance on your company.
THE Small Business Expert, Award-winning entrepreneur, New York Times bestseller, keynote speaker, media personality and attorney.
