Lateral Moves in a Vertical Market

In a saturated market, the natural instinct is to climb. You lower your prices to undercut the competitor below you, or you add features to chase the competitor above you. This is vertical thinking. It is a war of attrition, and for most SMEs, it is a suicide mission.

When the board is blocked, moving forward is impossible. This is why our logo is the Knight. It is the only piece on the board capable of jumping over the line.

The Vertical Trap

Consider the traditional printing industry in the 1990s—a sector we know well from our origins. As desktop publishing democratised design, printers who stuck to a "vertical" strategy (buying faster presses to print cheaper) eventually died on thin margins.

The winners were those who made a Lateral Move. They didn't just print; they moved sideways into Data Management and Digital Asset Archiving. They realised their clients didn't just need ink on paper; they needed help managing the files that created the ink.

Identifying the Vector

A lateral move requires you to redefine your asset base. You are not selling a product; you are monetising a capability.

• The Logistics Pivot: A trucking company realises their true asset isn't the trucks, but the routing software. They pivot to sell SaaS logistics solutions to other fleets.
• The Service Pivot: A hardware vendor realizes hardware is a commodity. They pivot to offer "Predictive Maintenance" subscriptions using IoT sensors, selling uptime rather than parts.

Execution: Speed Over Perfection

Lateral moves are risky because they take you into unknown territory. The key to execution is speed. Do not build the perfect new product. Build the "Bridge"—the Minimum Viable Solution that connects your old authority to your new value proposition.

At Tactics Solutions, we specialise in identifying these adjacent vectors. We look at your vertical not as a ladder to climb, but as a platform to jump from.