How Do You Generate Candidate Growth Options?
You generate candidate options by working through the adjacency expansions of the core — new products for existing customers, existing products in new segments or geographies — plus, in a PE context, the add-on acquisitions that can deliver any of these inorganically. Most growth options are adjacencies to the core, and working through them systematically surfaces a fuller set than instinct alone.
The three foundational organic moves are: offer a new product to existing customers, use the existing product in an adjacent segment, or expand into new geographies. Each extends a known strength along one dimension, which is what makes adjacencies lower-risk than entirely new bets — an important consideration under a leveraged structure.
In practice these resolve into several concrete patterns:
- Geographic expansion — taking the core into a new region.
- Industry expansion — moving a core focused on one industry into a related one.
- Customer-segment expansion — pivoting from one customer type to another, such as enterprise to mid-market.
- Buyer expansion — addressing a new buyer role within the market.
- Use-case adjacency — extending use cases based on demand patterns in the existing base.
In a company, each of these can also be pursued inorganically through an add-on acquisition, which is often faster than building — a key reason buy-and-build is central to many theses. Generating candidates this way widens the field before any filtering. Rather than fixating on the move that feels obvious, the CEO produces a structured set of organic and inorganic options — each anchored to a real strength or a clear acquisition rationale — that can then be filtered and evaluated against the strategy.
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