A rule change is a deadline every affected business shares

Regulations are published months before they bite, they name exactly who they apply to, and almost nobody reads them until it is late.

The date is the whole product

A recall is an emergency you find out about on the day. A rule change is the opposite: it is announced, written down, and then sits there for six or nine or eighteen months before it starts applying. Accessibility requirements for websites, packaging and labelling rules, e-invoicing mandates, register-of-beneficial-owner filings, waste and deposit schemes, licensing thresholds. All of them arrive with a date attached.

That gap is the opportunity, and it is the one kind of opportunity you can see coming. Everybody affected has the same deadline, most of them do not know about it yet, and the ones who do know are hoping it is somebody else's job.

Read who it applies to, not what it says

The text of a regulation is written for lawyers and it is genuinely dull. You do not need it. What you need is two lines that are always near the top: the scope, which tells you which businesses are caught, and the commencement date, which tells you when.

"Businesses with more than ten employees supplying packaged food to consumers in this country, from 1 March" is a customer list and a calendar entry. That is a better brief than most agencies work from.

The work is almost never legal work

This trips people up. They read "regulation" and assume the response requires a qualification, so they close the tab. In practice the compliance itself is usually somebody's afternoon: relabelling a product range, rewriting a page of a website, redoing a form so it captures one more field, photographing stock, updating a supplier list, getting a document translated, sitting down and filling something in.

You are not advising on the law, and you should say so plainly. You are doing the work the law creates. Those are different jobs and only one of them needs a licence.

Timing beats everything else here

Approach too early and it is not real to them yet; the reply is "we will look at that nearer the time", which is a no with a date on it. Approach the week after the deadline and they have either sorted it or they are panicking and buying from whoever is nearest.

Six to ten weeks out is the window. Long enough that they cannot ignore it, short enough that doing nothing has started to feel like a decision. Put the date in the subject line.

Where to find them

Every market publishes its own, and this is the one area where where you live genuinely changes what is available to you: some countries put changes on a single government feed, others scatter them across regulators. What is watched in each country is set out per market rather than promised in general.

And whatever you find, apply the usual test before you spend a week on it. A rule change with a date, a named scope and a link is a real opportunity. A blog post saying regulations are getting stricter is not.