Are you building an agile business?

New problems require new solutions. Imagine dropping your keys behind your sofa. You can’t recover them in the same way as keys left underneath a pile of post. You need to try something different. The same goes for business challenges.

The best way to overcome obstacles to your commercial growth (like market fluctuations or changes in consumption patterns) is to think outside the box. This will likely mean changes to your business plan, as new ideas power your growth.

Business plans don’t have to be set in stone. When you designed your plan, you were probably factoring in completely different market conditions than you’re having to trade through now. With so much uncertainty in the world at the moment, agile thinking will give you the best chance of achieving profitability.

Here we’ll give you some tips on how to adjust your business plan. Then you won’t have to worry about veering off course if you take a different route to your goals.

Celebrate Change

Renowned scientist Albert Einstein once defined insanity as: “Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”. If part of your business strategy isn’t delivering the results that you need, then change it. There’s no point employing staff who aren’t productive or holding investments that are consistently losing you money.

Create a culture of reflection in your team. If something doesn’t deliver as expected, can it be fixed? If not, what’s the most effective way to replace it?

Questions that your team might ask could include:

• Can you find a different way to incentivise their performance?
• Are new and emerging markets offering more profitable commercial opportunities than the markets you’re currently active in?
• Is the metaverse providing you with a new and exciting range of marketing opportunities?
• How does your business intend to capitalise on artificial intelligence in boosting your growth?

Don’t build a static business in a changing world. Constantly search for new and exciting ways to achieve growth.

Encourage feedback from your team

There’s no point in staff reflecting on the future of your business if management ignores their reflections.

Imagine taking time out of your day to suggest changes that would make everyone in the office happier. Ten minutes or so later you pluck up the courage to hand your suggestions to your manager. They shut you down.

How disheartened would you feel?

You don’t want any of your employees to experience this disappointment. Encouraging your team to always articulate any of their concerns will incorporate a wider range of cognitive diversity into your decision-making processes.

That doesn’t just give you access to a variety of opinions; it lets you tap into different ways of thinking.

Different approaches to problem-solving are essential for innovation. If everyone in the room approaches subjects in the same way, you’ll get different versions of the same responses to business challenges.

The idea that nobody else thought of could drive the next decade of your commercial growth. Take care to ensure that it doesn’t get ignored because of a resistance to changing your business plan.

Monitor Trends

Nobody ever wants to become yesterday’s news. Customers don’t want to buy it either. Staying on top of popular trends will help you to create products and services that are as relevant as possible to your target market.

Tailoring your offering to appeal to emerging trends will alter your business plan and may involve significant investment in new manufacturing technologies.

A lot of these changes will centre around the question of ‘how’ you’ll achieve your goals. In some situations (such as a global pandemic), they might even change ‘what’ you sell. But the one thing that trends will never change is your ‘why’.

The motivation behind your business will stay the same no matter what’s trending. Monitoring trends lets you monetise your motivation as effectively as possible. Exhibit A of this would probably be businesses widely adopting Zoom as a platform for meetings when the pandemic in the UK was at its worst.

Stay on the right side of regulations

Nobody’s above the law: full stop. Trying to bend the rules a bit now will just leave you fighting fines and court cases later down the line. It will also lose you clients. As soon as a business makes headlines for rule-breaking, it becomes radioactive. Then it struggles to survive.

You don’t want that to happen to your business. Don’t break the rules. Make sure that any changes from your original business plan stay within the spirit of the regulations as well as the letter of them. Your agile business can also be an ethical one.

Adapting your business plan within these parameters will help you to come out of uncertainty with profitability on the other side.