How will you grow your business?

There are only four ways to grow your business:

Mess around with the products/services you sell…
Mess around with the markets/people you sell to… or
Some combination of the two or
Keep doing what you are currently doing.
That’s it.

At the Growth Strategies Conference in London, they asked the audience the question “How do you plan to grow your business?”

The results of the vote was as follows:

I plan to grow the business:

33%: existing product/existing market (No. 4 above)
17%: new product/existing market (No. 1)
36%: existing product/new market (No. 2)
14%: new product/new market (No. 3)
So what does this tell us?

69% of the voters are sticking to selling their existing products (phew!) (Nos. 2 & 4)
31% of the voters are using a new product to grow their business (Nos. 1 & 3)
14% have gone for the high-risk new/new option (No. 3)
The above can be translated into a 2×2 matrix and is the only really stunning piece of business school theory that is really valuable (it is referred to as the Ansoff Matrix).