Identifying new opportunities
This time, the trend was genuine. Data centres need land, power, cooling, emissions management, connectivity, security, construction expertise and long-term operational support, and every hyperscaler build cascades into demand for the specialists who supply it. Defence budgets are rising across most allied markets, and primes and their tier-1s are under pressure to qualify new suppliers faster than at any point in a generation. Real demand, arriving faster than either market can currently absorb it.
What hadn’t happened was any real test of whether this business could actually win a place in either market, at what cost, on what timeline, and against what odds.
This is The Leap.
The trap -appetite is not the same as opportunity
A board hearing a phrase like “the AI boom” or “rising defence budgets” tends to hear a market size. It should hear a question. The headline figure describes total spend across an entire economy of buyers, most of whom a given business will never reach, let alone win. The number that matters is narrower and harder to get to: the slice of that spend a specific business could credibly compete for, given who actually decides, how those buyers qualify a new supplier, and how long that takes.
This is true of almost any new market, but some gate entry more tightly than others, and it’s worth knowing which kind you’re looking at before you commit. Infrastructure buyers around AI data centres, for instance, decide on outcomes and proof, not product features, and expect compliance credentials to lead the conversation rather than support it. Defence buyers decide through formal specification: a part is qualified to a named standard before it can be considered at all, and once something is specified into a platform, swapping it triggers costly requalification, which is exactly why incumbents are so hard to dislodge. In markets like these, being unknown to the people who decide isn’t a disadvantage to be marketed around. It can be a structural exclusion, and no amount of commercial effort fixes it alone.
Not a sizing problem by itself, and not an effort problem. A viability question the leadership team has to answer before it commits, not after.
A leadership team sat down with us this year debating whether to chase a booming adjacent market. The trend behind the conversation happened to be AI infrastructure investment and rising defence budgets, but the pattern repeats with almost any macro shift: a market is suddenly flush with money, the business’s existing capability looks adjacent to it, and appetite quietly gets mistaken for opportunity.
“We keep hearing where the money is right now, AI infrastructure and defence. We do things that should be relevant to both, materials, compliance, environmental performance. So we’ve asked the team to go after it.”
Where to start to assess
Size the opportunity you could actually win, not the trend.
Take the headline figure apart until it describes a specific, addressable slice: the tier of the supply chain, the category of specification, the accounts realistically in scope for a business of this size and track record. In AI infrastructure, that might mean the specific layer of the supply chain your capability actually serves, cooling, materials, compliance, rather than “data centres” as a category. In defence, it might mean the specific platforms and programmes your specification could plausibly enter. Most of any boom is unreachable by a new entrant. The board needs to know how much genuinely isn’t.
Test access before appetite.
Establish whether the business can actually get in front of the people who decide, and be considered at all. In defence, engineering and procurement teams often sit behind closed networks and undocumented org charts. In infrastructure supply chains, approved vendor lists are frequently already controlled by a hyperscaler’s tier-1s. Whatever the market, if there’s no credible route to being seen by the people who decide, size and appetite don’t matter yet.
Test the right to win, not just the right to compete.
Establish exactly what it takes to be specified, qualified or accredited in this market, and whether the business can genuinely clear that bar, in what timeframe, and against which entrenched incumbents. Specification-led markets, defence being the clearest example, rarely reward a better product alone. They reward whoever can prove, formally, that they meet the standard first.
Price the entry, and the patience it demands.
Establish realistically how long and how much capital it takes to become eligible, accreditation, relationship-building, technical proof, before any revenue lands. Boards routinely underprice this, approve a commercial budget, then lose confidence in year one of what was always a three-year runway, in AI infrastructure and defence alike.
Check whether the position can be defended once won.
Ask what happens after the leap succeeds. In markets that lock incumbents in through specification or approved-vendor status, the same structural advantage that protects a winner today will just as readily protect the next entrant against this business tomorrow. Winning access is not the same as owning it.
I don’t have six months to run an assessment while a queue of other companies moves ahead of us. The board wants this moving now.”
The pragmatic reality – a trade off is needed
The CEO listened, agreed with the logic, and raised the real tension.
“I don’t have six months to run an assessment while a queue of other companies moves ahead of us,” he said. “The board wants this moving now.”
He was right that the queue is real. He was wrong that the assessment is what’s slowing things down. A properly scoped viability test, sizing, access, right to win, cost and defensibility, takes weeks, not months, and it is precisely what stops a business from spending a year building a commercial motion aimed at a market it was never going to be allowed into. The teams that move fastest and survive the leap are rarely the ones who skipped the assessment. They’re the ones who ran it quickly, then committed hard once they knew where they genuinely stood a chance.
Connecting the two: the approach in outline
Size
Take the market trend apart into the specific, addressable opportunity this business could credibly compete for, given its capability, track record and scale.
Test
Assess access and right to win directly: who decides, whether the business can be seen by them, and what it would genuinely take to be qualified, specified or accredited.
Decide
Take a considered view to leadership and the board: commit fully, commit conditionally to a narrower entry point, or walk away, backed by evidence rather than enthusiasm for the trend.
Sequence
Where the answer is commit, price the entry cost and timeline honestly, and only then design the commercial motion, credibility building, account engagement and qualification work, run in parallel against a realistic runway.
What to watch for
The signs worth paying attention to, whatever the market:
- Leadership has adopted the headline market trend as if it were the business’s own addressable opportunity
- Nobody has mapped whether the business can actually reach, or be seen by, the people who decide
- Nobody has tested what it would take to be qualified, specified or accredited, or how long that genuinely takes
- A commercial budget has been approved before anyone has priced the cost and time of becoming eligible to compete at all
- Nobody has asked whether the position, once won, can be defended, or whether the business will simply be the next entrant leapfrogged in turnThe case for entering rests on the size of the trend rather than evidence of a credible route in
None of these are fatal on their own. Together, they are the early warning that a business is chasing a boom, AI infrastructure and defence being the two most live examples right now, that it hasn’t yet established it can actually win.
If any of this sounds familiar, it usually is. The businesses that get the leap right are rarely the first to spot the opportunity. They are the ones who tested whether they could win it before they spent anything proving they wanted it.
