Two of the focuses of my blog are Financial Literacy/Money and Business/Entrepreneurship. As a business owner, you want your business to be able to agile and to be able to adjust. Doing so will increase its chances of survival in circumstance like the current Covid-19. The following contributed post is entitled, Keeping Your Business Agile.
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The COVID-19 pandemic has taught us a lot of things about a lot of things. It’s shown us which governments step up to the plate in times of crisis, and which do not. It’s reminded us how something as simple as washing our hands regularly can save lives. And it’s proven an emphatic reminder to many businesses just how ill-prepared they are for crisis, even though they’ve enjoyed robust turnovers and healthy profit margins for many years. In times of fair weather, we can lose our introspection. We can fall back on old familiar processes and lose the urge to change them. After all, if it ain’t broke, why would you want to fix it? The problem is that when a crisis comes along like a huge market shift, a disruptive technological revolution or a worldwide pandemic, complacency can mean death for businesses. Look no further than Blockbuster video for a reminder that crises come in all shapes and sizes.
Image by Yogendra Singh via Pexels
Businesses need to be agile in order to counter the changing nature of the challenges it faces. In an era where technology is changing with alarming speed, and consumer habits are changing in kind, it shouldn’t take a global pandemic to encourage us to shed weight, make our operations leaner and make our businesses more agile.
Here are some ways in which you can restore your business’ agility…
Don’t be afraid to outsource
You’re the best there is at what you do. But don’t mistake that for being the best at everything. When it comes to your digital infrastructure, for instance, doing everything yourself can make you unnecessary unwieldy and sluggish. Investing in managed IT and Computer Support Services, however, can not only make it easier to adapt to changing technological environments, it can help you to put out little fires faster and minimize potentially crippling downtime.
Shorten the communications cycle
As businesses get bigger, communications between teams can become needlessly complex. Multichannel environments can make communications harder to keep track of and reference for future conversations and strategy meetings. Make your communications more efficient, both in terms of channels and in terms of content and you’ll avoid ambiguity and miscommunications while also streamlining your response to crises of all kinds.
Stay aware of what’s going on around you
Your business doesn’t exist in a vacuum. While it’s understandable and admirable that you’d want to keep your attention firmly on your own work, you should always maintain an awareness of what’s going on inside and outside of your industry. Every book, every newspaper, every blog post, it all helps to weave a tapestry that can help you make better informed decisions and react decisively to market change. This means carrying out market research and competitor analysis regularly. It means A/B testing your digital marketing materials, and it means keeping both hands on the proverbial wheel at all times.
If the recent months have taught us anything, it’s that there’s no such thing as being too agile, and that businesses that can’t adapt quickly and decisively to crises can suffer fatally.
