Ansoff’s Matrix – Planning for Growth

• Lesson
• Exercise
• Answer

Colorado Ricardo Mountain Bikes was founded by Ricardo Francisco in 1992. He was a keen cyclist who spent his weekends with many friends cycling and having fun in the mountains of Colorado. He was very competitive and loved to take his bike off-road to test his strength and endurance.

Ricardo’s company needs strategies for growth before it is too late. Use Ansoff’s matrix to examine the options for Colorado Ricardo.

However he found that the bikes themselves kept on breaking-down under the strain. So Ricardo designed and built a number of bikes to overcome this problem. Many failed but eventually he came up with the ultimate in off-road bike, which he called the ‘Colorado Ricardo’.People liked Ricardo’s bike and he was asked to build and sell them to other cyclists in the Colorado region. It went so well that soon he was able to give up his own job as a DJ to focus on the construction of the bikes.

As the mountain bike sport took off, Ricardo’s business grew to produce 10,000 units in 1996. However sales have fallen annually since then and forecasted sales for 2000 are only 4,000 units.