Eight Tips for Future Business Resilience
What can we do to build more resilient businesses?
We are all starting this journey from different places. The impact on the private sector of government responses to Covid-19 ranges from thriving to complete destruction.
I offer these eight tips as possible “food for thought” whether you’re re-starting, re-building, or resuming:
1. Re-define what it means to be a resilient business – revisit business risk and continuity planning to be less conservative than in the past – think the unthinkable.
2. Nurture entrepreneurialism – no matter how mature your business is, encourage innovation. Entrepreneurialism will thrive as we emerge from this pandemic, but why should this happen outside of your business? If you’ve lost some of it, how can you rediscover your own entrepreneurial mindset and energy, and encourage others to be entrepreneurial while they still work in your business?
3. Strip back bureaucratic decision-making – review how decisions are made and remove steps which add no value. Ensure where possible, that decisions are taken faster enabling your business to adopt defensive, opportunistic, and expansive positions more quickly.
4. Invest in capability to better harness data – I view this as a necessity; it is a component enabling all the other things listed here. Data quality, data accrual, data mining and data analysis is increasingly important. Become a more intelligent business; get the right data to flow at the right time to the right locations to make well-informed, faster, and less risky decisions.
5. Get exposure to future-proofed and growing sectors – determine sectors which are, and will remain, durable. Develop and implement strategy and tactics to win direct market-share or indirect exposure along the connected value-chain.
6. Reduce dependencies – a longstanding risk management strategy but as relevant as ever. Address customer and supplier dependencies especially.
7. Improve productivity – People right across your business involved in the day-to-day, will tell you immediately what hinders them. Acting to remove hindrances can quickly lead to productivity [and morale] improvements.
8. Communication – Establish and articulate a clarity of purpose for your business as it emerges from this disruptive period. Enable everyone to connect what they do each day with the pursuit and achievement of that purpose.
Not a definitive list by any means, you will all no doubt have things you might add to it.
If you are doing things which are working well for you, I’d love to hear about them.
Steve Anstey - Managing Director
