Trend Tracking: Six Essential Steps for Spotting Your Next Opportunity

I once asked Fred Smith, the founder of FedEx, what led him to start the company back in 1971. He explained that, at the time, he was running a company at the Little Rock, Arkansas, airport, refurbishing executive aircraft. It was there he began to notice that with increasing frequency, business people were showing up at his company to see if they could charter one of his planes to get some “time sensitive” shipment someplace in a hurry. “The existing freight forwarders hadn’t noticed this unmet need,” he told me. “To us it seemed like an huge opportunity.”