Every CEO drives home playing mental gymnastics over the next big growth opportunity. They should; it is a large part of what they are paid for. But are they looking in the right places? The answer we hear is somewhere between yes and no: yes I am searching, no I am not finding opportunities that make sense for this business. The economy is fragile, competition is fierce, the company is too big, we have non-growth DNA. All common. All beside the point.
Profitable, compatible growth lives behind two doors.
Door one: products offered
Take the products you are good at and profitable in, and find new customer segments, industries or geographies with the same need and without your distribution. Every international expansion is a product-offered move. Coca-Cola asked "where else can we sell this?" until the answer was more than 200 countries. If you have already "tried that region," you have not dug deep enough into the real need the product satisfies or the segments that have it.
Door two: markets served
Take a customer group you have a strong franchise with and understand well, and ask what additional unmet needs you could serve by leveraging that relationship. Call it brand extension if you like; the value is matching intimacy with a segment to the ability to deliver a modified or new product to it.
Which door
Outline your product segments and the need each serves. Outline your market segments and what makes them distinct. Then decide, honestly, whether your capabilities fit a product to more places or more products to the same places. That decision is the growth strategy. Everything else is a project list.
Where it sits now
This is the product-market matrix, tool three of the MOVE® system, scored on profit, advantage, growth and risk and then checked against market reality from outside. The two doors are the rows and columns. The cells tell you which door, and by how much.
Monday
Write your three most profitable products across the top of a page and your three most valuable customer groups down the side. For each empty cell, ask: do they have this need, and could we serve it? The first honest yes is your next growth decision.
