If you’re running a business, then looking at the news is an alarming risk to your blood pressure at the moment. Prices are rising, inflation is galloping, and logistics issues appear to be ongoing. There is little promise of stability in the short term, and that means customers and clients have less money to spend and are much more cautious about committing the resources they do have.
The time is ripe to take a look at your business: its processes, its structure, its strategies and plans and make sure they’re fit for the difficult economic weather that’s blowing in.
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Getting Help
If you want to make sweeping changes to your business, then it may well be worth going to specialists for help with your transformation. Business consultants are no longer the preserve of immensely wealthy conglomerates – with the sort of boutique consulting firms London hosts in large numbers now, you can get a service from strategy consultants uniquely fitted to your business’ place in the ecosystem.
Prioritise
With revenue and spending money squeezed in all sorts of ways, the main thing that suffers is diversity: you can’t afford to take risks on multiple projects, different ideas and directions for your business at the same time. That doesn’t mean giving up on growth and invention, it just means you have to prioritise carefully and work out what is most important to you – or most vital to your business.
This doesn’t necessarily mean ‘what makes the most money in the short term’ – though another effect of economic downturns is that this does make its way up the priority list at the cost of less immediately tangible benefits.Customers have a sense of when they’re being taken advantage of, and rushing a new product out to cash on in demand while making cuts that compromise the quality your customers are used could destroy your brand overnight.
Future Opportunities
You may well have to make cuts to keep your business going through this downturn, but you should be constantly assessing how much these cuts can be rebuilt from. Look at the example of the travel industry. Many airlines and airports cut lots of staff due to the collapse in traveller numbers during the Covid-19 pandemic, and they’ve struggled to recover staff at the same rate as traveller numbers have climbed again. Think about resilience as well as cutting costs – the two risks of downturns are that your business loses revenue and can’t pay its costs, and that you cut too hard and can’t regrow.