You've identified your opportunities. You've scored them. Now what?
The obvious ones are easy. High score, clear fit, resources available, pursue them. But most opportunities aren't obvious. They sit in the middle: interesting but not urgent, valuable but not ready, worth something but not worth everything.
The question isn't pursue or pass. It's: which opportunities do you keep open, and at what cost?
The default mindset doesn't work here
Most founders think about opportunities in binary terms. See a good one, go all in. Pass on the rest. The advice they hear reinforces this: focus, focus, focus.
Reid Hoffman put it bluntly:
"Keeping your options open is frequently more of a risk than committing to a plan of action."
He's right, if you're talking about indecision. Keeping options open as a way to avoid commitment is expensive and gets you nowhere.
But Eric Ries offers a different perspective:
"Pivots are a permanent fact of life for any growing business. Even after a company achieves initial success, it must continue to pivot."
A pivot isn't just a decision to change direction. It's a move to something. You can only pivot if you have somewhere to pivot to, an opportunity.
The question isn't whether to stay focused or keep options open. It's how to hold options intentionally while you execute on your primary plan. You're not avoiding commitment. You're maintaining choices for when circumstances change.
Both Hoffman and Ries are right. They're just warning about different failure modes. Hoffman warns against paralysis disguised as optionality. Ries describes what it looks like to hold options deliberately, as part of a structured approach to uncertainty. The difference is whether you're avoiding decisions or maintaining choices.
You already understand this logic
Stock options, contract options, real estate options, you pay a small premium now for the right to act later. You're not committing. You're buying the choice.
Most options expire worthless. That's fine. The value was never in exercising every option. It was in having the choice when conditions changed.
Business opportunities work the same way. The adjacent market you've explored, the partnership you've discussed, the product extension customers keep mentioning, these are options. You can hold them without pursuing them. The question is what premium you're willing to pay.
What the premium looks like
Keeping an opportunity open isn't free. The premium comes in different forms.
Time. Conversations, research, relationship maintenance. The founder who has coffee with a potential partner twice a year is paying a time premium to keep that option open.
Attention. Staying aware of a market, tracking a technology, noticing when conditions change. Attention is finite. Every option you monitor is attention not spent elsewhere.
Money. Small experiments, pilot projects, proof-of-concept work. Some options require investment to keep viable.
Focus. This is the real cost. Every opportunity you're maintaining is focus pulled from current execution. The advice to "focus" isn't wrong, it's just incomplete. The question is how much focus to allocate to options versus execution.
How to size the premium
Not all options deserve the same investment. Here's how to think about which opportunities are worth keeping open and at what cost.
An option is worth more when:
Uncertainty is high. If you knew exactly what was coming, you wouldn't need options. The more uncertain your market, technology, or competitive landscape, the more valuable it is to have places to go.
The cost to keep it open is low. An opportunity you can maintain with a quarterly coffee is cheaper than one requiring ongoing investment. Low-cost options are almost always worth holding.
You can wait to decide. Options that don't expire soon give you time to learn. Options with closing windows force earlier decisions.
Exercising later doesn't cost much more than exercising now. Some opportunities get harder to capture over time, a competitor enters, a market matures, a relationship cools. Others stay roughly the same cost whenever you act.
An option is worth less when:
The situation is predictable. If you're confident in your path, the option to do something different has limited value.
Maintenance cost is high. Some opportunities require significant ongoing investment just to remain viable. That premium adds up.
It expires soon. An option you'll lose if you don't act immediately isn't really an option, it's a decision.
Waiting makes it much harder. If delay significantly increases the cost to exercise, you're not really holding an option. You're postponing a decision while the price rises.
The goal is matching the premium to the potential. High-value options in uncertain environments can justify real investment. Low-value options in predictable situations rarely do.
Managing your opportunity portfolio
You're not holding one opportunity. You're holding many, in different states.
Active pursuit: Commitments you're executing on. These have moved past the option stage. You've decided to act.
Active maintenance: Options you're paying a small premium to keep open. You're not pursuing them yet, but you're keeping them viable.
Watch list: Opportunities you're tracking but not investing in. You're aware of them, nothing more.
Most of your opportunities should sit in maintenance or on the watch list. The key question for each: what's the minimum effort to keep this option open?
| Example | Cost | Value |
|---|---|---|
| SaaS founder meets potential enterprise partner twice a year, no agenda | A few hours annually | When ready to go upmarket, trust and context already exist |
| Consultancy keeps a doc outlining productized version of common engagement, tests pricing occasionally | A few hours monthly | When consulting revenue dips, not starting from scratch |
| Two agency owners with complementary specialties grab lunch twice a year | Two lunches | When one lands a project too big to handle alone, trusted partner ready |
None of these are commitments. They're premiums paid to keep options open.
Options don't stay in maintenance forever
At some point, each opportunity will move. You'll either exercise it (commit resources, take action, convert the option into something real) or you'll let it expire, deciding the cost of holding it no longer justifies the potential.
What triggers that move? Sometimes it's new information. You learn something that makes the opportunity clearly worth pursuing, or clearly not. Sometimes it's a change in circumstances, yours or the market's. The opportunity becomes urgent, or it becomes irrelevant.
The founders who navigate uncertainty well aren't luckier. They just know what they're holding, what it costs to hold it, and they pay attention to signals that an option is ready to move.
The value is in having choices
Opportunities protect you when things go wrong and they're how you grow when things go right. You need to identify them, figure out which ones to hold, and know when to exercise them or let them expire.
The goal isn't to pursue every opportunity. It's to hold the right options, at the right cost, so you have choices when you need them.
Get your opportunities mapped
Want to find your opportunities systematically? The Siqnalis Opportunity Check identifies and scores opportunities automatically.
Enter your company name, URL, and location. In about 15 minutes, you'll get a prioritized list of opportunities across market, competitive, and innovation dimensions.
Free. No signup required, just request access.