1. Seek out new markets for current
products and services, and work to generate ideas for new opportunities
outside of current normal markets and customers. Sometimes these
will seem obvious once you’ve thought of them, but often
they are not intuitive. For such projects for my clients, I look
at everything the company does, everything they have ever done,
and what they could do. Sometimes I have to tweak their products
in one way or another, but inevitably I find new uses, markets
and customers for their products that were never considered. The
key here is to look at the solutions you provide, rather than
the applications for which they’re currently serving. If
you’re successful in generating these opportunities, you
effectively increase your revenue opportunities by the size of
the new markets you’ve found. They may be unusual, and your
pricing and operations may have to change a bit, but accommodating
changes for those new markets can open you up to tremendous potential
growth even during tough times.
2. Next, partner strategically (not
the same as strategic partners) with companies that provide skills,
IP, technology, capability or resources that can complement your
firm, often in non-intuitive ways. We’re all truly in this
together, and I look for companies that can uniquely integrate
into my client’s offerings. One of the immediate benefits
is the wheel doesn’t have to be re-invented; the partnering
firm will have already made the R&D investment. When combined
with seeking out new opportunities above, the resulting capabilities
can serve entirely new markets and customers in uses that never
were anticipated. You must keep an open mind and see the potential
connections that can be made – not just what obviously seems
to fit together.
3. Find new uses and customers for
excess facility, capacity and capability. What other excess capacity
might you have, and can there be markets for it? For example,
if you have excess warehouse space, rent it out. Factory capability?
Programming skills? Make it available for outsourcing. For my
clients, I seek out every bit of idle capacity and capability
and find new ways to change them from cost centers into profit
centers, generating new revenue outside of current operations.
Some of my clients have such talented and useful internal operations,
they end up spinning off entirely new businesses composed of what
were once internal functions. For others, I’ve found their
byproducts are actually worthwhile for another unrelated kind
of enterprise and can generate revenue rather than be simply disposed.
Again, the key is to keep a creative eye on what can be turned
into a revenue-generating product or service. They frequently
come from the least-obvious places!
