A business is made of obligations.

Each one is tied to someone. A stakeholder. Someone the company must act toward in a specific way, over and over.

Customer. Employee. Investor. Government. Public.

Each one involves a series of acts.

A customer is to be found, convinced, sold to, served, billed, supported, and followed up with.

An employee is to be searched for, evaluated, hired, onboarded, managed, paid, reviewed, and offboarded.

An investor is to be pitched, updated, reported to, given documents, given access, and kept aligned.

The government is to be given taxes, records, safety data, audits, compliance reports, and identity checks.

The public has to see your posture in writing, messaging, partnerships, and silence.

Every one of these acts must be done. Most must be repeated. Some must be exact.

Why look at stakeholders this way? Because every obligation creates cost. Cost creates opportunity.

Business operations are a catalog of unsolved problems.

Every task to be performed is software waiting to be built. Every compliance requirement is a platform waiting to be created.

This framework forces you to see systematically instead of hunting random problems.

Take customer acquisition.

The surface act is “find customers.” Go deeper. Finding means identifying target profiles, sourcing contacts, qualifying interest, tracking conversations, scheduling follow-ups, measuring responses.

Each layer reveals tool requirements.

Target profiling needs demographic analysis software. Contact sourcing needs database tools. Interest qualification needs scoring algorithms.

Go deeper still. Demographic analysis requires data collection, cleaning, segmentation, visualization.

Each sub-process creates tool demand.

Employee hiring breaks into job posting, candidate sourcing, application screening, interview scheduling, skill assessment, reference checking, offer negotiation, contract generation.

Skill assessment divides into technical testing, behavioral evaluation, culture fit analysis, performance prediction.

Every breakdown reveals new markets.

Deep analysis uncovers underserved niches.

How deep should you go? Deep enough to find actions that feel manual, repetitive, or inefficient.

If they’re manually copying data between systems, that’s automation opportunity.

Start with five stakeholder categories. List every obligation. Break obligations into acts. Break acts into steps. Identify problematic steps.

Problematic steps are business opportunities.

The customer who takes weeks to convert signals better qualification tools. Employee onboarding requiring constant oversight indicates automation opportunity. Investor reporting consuming entire weekends suggests platform need.

Stakeholder relationships are universal business requirements.

Specific implementations vary, but patterns remain consistent.

Universal patterns create scalable opportunities.

Specific implementations create profitable niches.