The first step
The first step is to figure out where we’re located right now.
A useful reference system is certainly the BCG Matrix, created in the seventy by the Boston Consulting Group. This allows to classify the strategic business areas (ASA/SBU) or business activity in relation to growth rate and market share.
To briefly remember the carryover below:
| BCG Matrix | Market share | ||
| Low | High | ||
| Growth | High | Question marks: Just a nice dilemma, these questions points! We are on risky products, and we do not know what to do, also because the market runs, but we do not quite… | Stars: We are at maximum! But to stay at the maximum you need to run and invest… What do we want to do? Continue, sell or turn into a cash cow? |
| Low | Dogs: the “hounds”. Low-altitude, low-growth, low profits, and that horrible word: “buoyancy.” You live the day. You have to make some decisions if you don’t just want to survive. | Cash cows: the “milking cow”. Keep it up, until it turns well… It is an activity that, without struggling too much, gives you great satisfactions. Though… But the world goes on. | |
As you can easily infer you need to try to understand in which quadrant is our company or our product. Within a quadrant we may be more or less close to an extreme, in a border area, and even this understanding will help us understand something more.
In any way once you understand our location there will be a next step. Decide in which direction to move. And, at this point, it becomes indispensable to equip oneself with a strategy. Click here to see if you agree with this approach.
