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.

That time of year always comes. Larger companies across the UK must publish key annual financial statements that give a detailed picture of their growth prospects. Whenever profit & loss (P&L) accounts and balance sheets are mentioned, several paragraphs of jargon usually follow. This jargon is about as helpful to entrepreneurs as a surprise bill.

Let’s cut through the paperwork and get to the point of these financial statements.

But what about your own accounts?

Profit and loss accounts detail your company’s revenues and costs, and can be prepared on an annual, quarterly or even, monthly basis. You can see how much you’re having to spend to get one pound back in revenue. As well as simply showing ongoing profits and losses, these accounts can allow you, for example, to pinpoint unnecessary expenses and slower months.

This data can give you a clear picture of exactly how to increase your profitability as quickly as possible. You can then make sure that every key cost incurred by your business is accounted for. Otherwise, it’s so easy for expenses to go under the radar – something more important is always landing on your desk.

The information gleaned from an analysis of your P&L can show you which customers, products or services are adding significant value to your business, and which expenses need greater control. Without this analysis, businesses would never be able to get a grip of their operations.

 P&L accounts allow you to turn disappointing margins and wasted expenditure into seized opportunities.

How are balance sheets difficult?

Balance sheets don’t cover day-to-day spending. They focus on assets and liabilities at a point in time, exploring whether your business owns more than it owes, in other words, its worth. If you paid off all your debts in one go, and then sold all your assets, how much would you have left?

Without this analysis, it’s impossible to know how much your business can afford to borrow. Also, what would you do if your creditors demanded more stringent terms just as your debtors were taking longer to pay? How would you ensure your company’s survival?

Balance sheets are unique because they present snapshots of companies’ financial positions. They aren’t about ‘the year in review’. They’re all about the here and now. Balance sheets show you exactly when debt becomes unsustainable. Once you have this information, you can take appropriate action to attempt to balance your books.

Where do cash flow statements fit in?

Changes in balances sheets reflect changes in a company’s cash position. For example, more liabilities ultimately will mean less money in the bank. Cash flow statements play a crucial role in assessing and maintaining a company’s viability. They get behind profits and losses to demonstrate where the cash is coming from and going to. They can also help you to spot ‘bumps in the road’ in enough time for you to smooth those bumps in good time.

It’s a harsh learning curve that large customer orders won’t stop you running out of cash, unless you manage your cash flow carefully.

Your business has grown more than you were ever expecting. Your ambition and hard work have paid dividends. The doubters are wrong and you’re busier than you’ve ever been.

But there’s one small problem: you’re busier than you’ve ever been. You’re trying to craft a 25^th hour out of each day to get everything done. How can you adjust from successfully working on your own to managing a team capable of delivering the next stage of your commercial growth?

This article will offer a few tips for overcoming those early growth challenges. Hopefully it will help you to focus more on your vision for the future and less on paperwork piling up on your desk.

Keep extending your client profile

As you’re growing your business, you’ll develop long-term relationships with your clients. It’s inevitable. However, it’s vitally important to prioritise the development of relationships with multiple clients over dependency on just a few. So many businesses devote all their marketing resources to developing just a few relationships. If they lose one of those accounts, they’re left with a massive revenue hole to fill.

The stress of this sudden and unexpected drop in sales together with the ensuing cash flow crisis can stop growth plans in their tracks. By spreading your turnover across multiple accounts, you can protect your cash flow against the loss of a key client.

Know your people

Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses – including you. You want to make sure that everyone in your business is doing what they do best. But letting go is tough.

Many entrepreneurs struggle to relinquish any control over parts of their businesses. They’ve built them up from scratch. The idea of leaving somebody else to look after their marketing strategy, for example, feels like leaving a stranger to pet sit their puppy.

These feelings are completely understandable. After all, your business started as a dream. It has grown into a lucrative reality because of your grit and determination.

None of us entrepreneurs are invincible though. Trying to continue doing absolutely everything yourself will just make you more stressed, without seeing any reward in your annual profits. Focus on the things that you do better than anyone else. Then trust your colleagues to do their jobs outstandingly. The result is a happy, fulfilled and accountable team – and a healthy balance sheet.

Build a great culture

Create a workplace that your team loves walking (or logging) into every day. Provide ongoing and discreet support with both physical and mental health. Focus on the quality of colleagues’ work, not whether one of them needs to take an afternoon off to spend some quality time with their kids. Most importantly, let your staff know how grateful you are for their efforts and their talents whenever you speak to them. Your accountant will thank you at the end of the year.

Put great systems in place

If you’ve been watching any TV news lately, you’ve probably seen more than one piece about the importance of everyone following the same rules at work. In any business, accusations of favouritism or preferential treatment are toxic to growth forecasts.

You want to put clear processes in place, so that everyone knows what tasks they are responsible for and the performance levels that they need to maintain.

This can be significantly harder than it sounds.

When you first started your business, you made all the decisions. If something was bought, you bought it. If something was sold, you made that sale.

As your business grows, life gets more complex. Hence, it’s important to base all decisions on procedures that your whole team have easy and regular access to, without reliance on your personal intervention or decision – making. Instead, they will be based on impartial and transparent company policy.

By getting growth right, you can give your business real longevity. It’s not an easy process, but everything will be worth it when you’ve got (or sold) your huge business in 20 years’ time (or maybe a lot sooner!). Hopefully, these tips will help you along the way.

When you’re looking for business advice, are you unsure who to trust? Five minutes after you ask for advice to fix any issue, an excitable queue of experts immediately wants to connect on LinkedIn. Each one is ready to pitch you their thoughtful, theoretical solution to your challenge.

But will a theoretical solution provide you with the excellent results that you deserve? An excellent understanding of business theory is a must for any strategic adviser. But surely, the more important skill involves successfully applying that theory in real life?

If I spend years studying how a toaster works, but then forget to plug my toaster into the wall socket, I’ll be left with some rather cold bread. Real life experience is essential for problem-solving. This experience shows experts how their ideas will pan out in the real world.

Without this experience, an expert has no idea of the results they’ll actually achieve. This gives their prospective clients no idea of the value that they can expect to receive from taking their advice.

Let’s explore benefits of trusting experience over expertise when addressing commercial challenges in more detail.

Communicate crucial information to colleagues in their language

Does your marketing team need to know what your social media goals are for the next month? Yes.

Do they need to know about the impact of global inflationary pressures on your supply chain? No.

Speaking from experience allows you to tailor communications for different departments. Speaking your colleagues’ language makes your point in a way that they will immediately understand. General theories may seem irrelevant and leave people confused.

An experience-based approach helps your business to take practical steps forward while avoiding time-consuming and potentially frustrating misunderstandings.

Enjoy waffle-free consultancy

Are you sick of watching the clock in meetings, while yet another invoice lands in your inbox and your challenges remain unresolved?

Working with a consultant who has gone through everything that you’re going through makes a world of difference to your business. Their advice is proven because they’ve followed it themselves. As a result, they’ve moved from a successful commercial career to a successful consultancy career.

Far too many people who have never run a business have strong opinions about how you should run your business. Experience differs from expertise here because experience shows you an effective way forward. Expertise just generates expensive and (probably) confusing waffle if you can’t apply it to the situation that you’re in.

Implement Agile Solutions

Times change. So do the responses that will keep your business one step ahead of your competition. Experience-based solutions are easy to adjust if circumstances change. They are designed around your business rather than chapter 18 of an eminent textbook.

While expertise in any area is a crucial pillar of providing any advice, it’s experience that turns bold ideas into brilliant results. Theory alone will only take you so far.

As you bring people together to complete new and ambitious projects, here are four skills you should look for as you’re putting your team together.

Communication

Everybody has an opinion about just about everything. You need to find someone who has very high emotional intelligence. A great tailor can find fabrics that their clients love and put them together in ways that they love even more. Great communicators can work out how each individual team member feels about aspects of a project and can then find exactly the right words to persuade them to support the consensus view. The last thing you want is for your project to tank as tempers flare. A good communicator will stop this from happening.

Tranquillity

Your team will face highly pressurised situations as your project reaches its climax. You need to find someone who can stay calm under pressure and maintain a laser focus on the overall goal, no matter how tense a situation may get. They also need to keep the budget in mind, to save your team, and maybe your business, from facing cash flow problems, or an awkward conversation for you with your financier, due to excessive spending.

Creativity

Creative members of the team are very often misunderstood by their colleagues. It can often be thought that they spend the day wondering round in their own world. Although this is a gross generalisation, it is true that they might adopt their own working styles that might not totally align with their employers’ office cultures. Judging creative team members negatively because of this misses the point of why they play such a crucial role. What you’re looking for is that one moment of brilliance, where they see things that nobody else can see and suggest an idea that makes the impossible possible. Your team will be impoverished if it doesn’t include a creative member. As long as their conclusions result in innovations that push your projects forward, don’t worry too much about how they reached them.

Analysis

Someone has the wonderful task of reading through reams of reports, client data, industry statistics and legal information. Then they have the joy of condensing all of that information into another report that forecasts how successful your project will be. The analyst’s job is to join the dots to create the bigger picture from which the rest of the team can work. Attention to detail is absolutely key here. An almost super-powered concentration span is definitely a bonus as well. Your analyst needs to be able to find the information that your competitors can’t find. How they communicate the information is not vitally important. Your communicator can do the talking later.

Bringing it together

When combined, these skills have the potential to give you a highly productive team, capable of creating innovative projects that can carry your business years into the future, and several light years ahead of your competitors.