Strategy / Market Diversification
Don't wait for the market to change your mind.
"Change before you have to."
The businesses that last aren’t the ones that found one good client, or one reliable sector, and stopped there. They’re the ones that kept looking outward — because relationships change, industries shift, and the market that works today isn’t guaranteed to work tomorrow.
Diversification isn’t a defensive move. It’s how a business keeps finding its next chapter of growth, whether that growth is local, national, or international.
Where concentration hides
Client
Sector
Geography
The same pattern shows up in three places, no matter which business you look at.
- Client concentration: a handful of accounts can account for an entire year’s revenue, and losing even one changes the picture.
- Sector concentration: one industry can dominate the client list for so long that its slowdown becomes the business’s slowdown too.
- Geography: once growth plateaus locally, it has nowhere left to go unless the business is willing to look further afield.
None of this is a reason to panic. It’s a reason to build outward while things are working, not after they stop. A broader client base absorbs the loss of any one relationship. A spread across sectors means one industry’s downturn isn’t the whole business’s downturn. And expanding from a local footprint into regional, national, or international markets is often the only real source of new growth left once a market matures.
This isn’t a single decision. It’s a habit, always keeping half an eye on where the next reasonable step might be, long before the current ground gives way.
A Real Experience
In 2008, one industry's collapse taught me the real cost of putting too many eggs in one basket. Read the story →
Between 2007 and 2009, I ran a glossy 48 page magazine in Yaletown, which is a neighbourhood in Vancouver, delivered to 28,000 homes. Business was strong; so strong that four out of every five advertisers came from one booming sector: real estate. Prime positions were booked a year in advance, with a waiting list behind them.
Then the 2008 financial crisis hit, and within two months, that sector disappeared. The magazine held on for six months before closing.
It wasn't a failure of the product, the readership, or the team. It was concentration — too much of the business resting on one market, at exactly the moment that market needed us least. Had we used the good years to build into other sectors, the story would have ended differently.
That's the lesson every diversification conversation with a client starts from: build outward while things are going well, not after they stop.
