Turning an opportunity into a business

How to identify an opportunity?
My brother actually started the first company in 2001 with an activity that could be qualified as trading. In real terms, purchase and sale. He started noticing quite a number of requests for production buildings, storage buildings, buildings for livestock, for example, with stalls for cattle, etc. With nearly always the same uses, roughly the same surface areas, in relation to the size of the buying company yet always different dimensions.

Turning it into a business concept
Surface area and use are always similar enough. The end client is always in the same line of activity: agriculture, industry… as I explained before. So why not offer standard dimensions, a standardization of all this? So in that context, we came to the conclusion that offering standard building dimensions would reduce the risk of error, optimize production… – reduce the risk of error, because when it’s made to measure there’s a greater risk of error that with something standard, – optimize production since certain rooms are the same in a number of buildings. Obviously, complying with building standards, but imposing or at least trying to impose standard dimensions on our customers.

The business model
We thought from the product back through all those elements. How to offer a product with a different package to serve a broad customer base? And including digital was a must. Because in 2009, we weren’t in the early stages of internet, but it wasn’t as advanced as it is now, which isn’t as advanced as it will be in 10 years. What we realized was that… in 2009, the online presence of companies selling buildings was only companies that had shop-window type sites. We wanted to create a website with a different concept to, first, showcase our prices with well-finished packages, and bring something extra. That’s why the low-cost business model fit so perfectly into our desire to remotely sell buildings via a digital platform because it gave us the possibility to have a package, preserve the quality of our buildings, we saved money on certain structural costs by having potential clients come to us and presenting our offering to them inherently on our website. And we follow up by fulfilling our promise of quality buildings, at lower cost.