In my opinion, opportunities are the key to great strategic planning. You've never hear of, for example, a company that became great by fixing all of their weaknesses, or avoiding all of their threats - and you never will. That's because great success comes from taking appropriate risks to make great opportunities pay off. Every great business success story is based on this - and yours should be based on opportunities, too!
When you consider opportunities for a credit union, it's helpful to remember that there are many different types of opportunities. Not all opportunities are, for example, going to come from the business development folks. Let's take a look at the main types we have seen in the past.
First, all opportunities can be broadly classified as either "market-based" or "internal". Market-based opportunities are specifically opportunities that will succeed or fail based on the reaction of the marketplace. Classic examples of market-based opportunities are new products (such as a seniors club) and entry into new markets (such as a new employer group or geography).
With market-based opportunities, we can further break down our options into four categories:
1. Current business (current products sold to current members)
2. New product augmentation (new products sold to current members)
3. New market augmentation (current products sold to new markets)
4. Diversification (new products sold to new markets)
Although it looks like a good way to ameliorate risk, diversification often turns out to be the most risky of these four options, because you are giving up your strategic competency in doing what you do for your current member base.
In my next post, I'll discuss the different types of internal opportunities.
-Robert
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