Key Takeaways
- Explore how SCCU's advisors leverage IBISWorld for efficient research, unraveling the secrets to their team's success.
- Uncover how IBISWorld empowers SCCU's strategic partnerships, unlocking growth potential for their members.
- Discover how your business can leverage data-driven insights to provide winning guidance and advice.
Space Coast Credit Union (SCCU), founded more than 70 years ago, has grown from serving a small membership to helping more than 600,000 members and businesses across 34 counties in Florida. As their membership has multiplied, so too have their services.
In 2017, SCCU established a dedicated team of business advisors that act as local partners to their business members. The team understands how important it is for a business to run smoothly and efficiently. To help businesses succeed in their coastal Florida communities, they provide expert advice and consultation services free of charge to business members.
Their advisors go into every consultation with a deep understanding of the business member's goals and challenges, and specialized knowledge of how to solve them.
It’s been our honor to serve SCCU through the rise of their business advising program, providing the industry intelligence they need to offer strategic solutions that address goals and challenges of all sizes.
After more than six years serving SCCU, we sat down with their team to learn why their business advisors count on IBISWorld to jumpstart their consultations.
Part 1: The Challenge
Business owners come from all kinds of backgrounds. Some are masters of their craft, masters at crunching the numbers, or master marketers. Only in rare cases do business owners have everything it takes to make their business a true success. That’s where business advisors come in.
Cultivating long-term success can look different from industry to industry. For business advisors to be able to offer specialized action plans, they need to understand the exact forces at play within each industry. If this sounds like a tall order to you, that’s because it is. Being the expert in one industry is hard enough. For a credit union serving just about every sector of the economy, offering expertise in dozens of different industries is a massive undertaking.
Part 2: The Solution
Having the resources to measure and react to shifting market dynamics and industry forecasts is a tremendous help when consulting with members. Getting up to speed on the economic headwinds, competitive landscape and market dynamics affecting a specific industry could take several weeks without efficient tools. Using IBISWorld’s online reports that cover thousands of industries, advisors can wrap up their research in a matter of hours.
Part 3: Why IBISWorld?
IBISWorld’s longstanding reputation across business and finance communities played a big part in SCCU’s decision to bring us on board.
The information in an IBISWorld report is designed with consultations in mind. We make it easy to present complex industry data in a practical way, facilitating strong communication and building trust between advisor and business owner.
How IBISWorld helps SCCU’s advisors the most
Preparation: To prepare for a consultation, advisors like Yorling Hurtado spend about an hour gathering research on the member and their industry, checking IBISWorld several times for key facts and data. Then, before heading into a meeting, Yorling and her peers review IBISWorld’s At a Glance chapter to help them line up their talking points with confidence.
Credibility: Bringing credible data to the table makes all the difference when advising a member on potentially life-changing strategies for their business. Being able to offer information and statistics right from IBISWorld’s reports puts both the business owner and the advisor at ease. SCCU’s business advisors have become masters when it comes to spotting hidden opportunities and red flags that business owners aren’t always aware of when they walk through the door.
Action: The goal of every consulting engagement at SCCU is to offer a thorough action plan and next steps for each member. Using detailed information on major markets and lucrative product lines from IBISWorld’s reports, business advisors like Yorling help business owners excel. She remembers an occasion where the insights from IBISWorld’s Products and Markets chapter helped one business owner expand his clothing store to capitalize on the women’s apparel market. In another example, Yorling was able to help a limousine company understand where their untapped revenue streams were most likely located and which competitors they would need to look out for when pursuing new markets.
Part 4: A Future with IBISWorld
We closed out our chat with SCCU on a particularly high note, with Business Services Manager Vanessa Sablon remarking that,
“Being able to make recommendations that help businesses grow is really our passion, and bringing value to our members – outside of just product or lending recommendations – is really what makes our credit union unique. Without access to IBISWorld’s industry data, we wouldn’t be able to offer the quality of service our members have come to expect from us.”
As IBISWorld continues to evolve and make our products more powerful than ever, we look forward to helping SCCU’s dynamic team of financial experts and business advisors reach new heights.
You can learn more about SCCU’s business advising services and find your future business advisor right on their website: https://www.sccu.com/small-business/business-advisors
