We are in survival mode as everyone is just trying to come to grips with the world of pandemic and lockdown. Some businesses are trying to move past survival mode and trying to grow their business, but they are struggling.

Think of the tough times as the golden times. With the current situation, it may be the best experience for you that you cannot be waiting for an opportunity, but where you should be taking this as an opportunity.

The world will not be the same anymore. The economy will be move faster and it will continue to change direction. Business today needs to respond even faster to digital requests from the business to catch-up with the change in the environment and, choose the best way to deal with it.

This is the perfect time to take the opportunity to improve your business. Make it flexible, fix important problems and upgrade your digital technology to prepare for future business. Use the data from digital technology to monitor your business and look for other ways to improve. All of this will make your business resilient and the automation will enable you to respond to the market changes.

To start with, you will have to look at your business needs today. Then you will have to predict what will happen as the pandemic and the restrictions ease. Finally, you will need to look at what will likely be the permanent changes and how your industry will change. Whilst this is not an easy task, you will need to have the flexibility to move with industry changes.

So let us take a look at some things that are highly likely to change:

• Use of digital technology and the ability to work remotely,
• Automating business and use of data to monitor and measure how business is operating and measuring the critical points,
• How the supply chain will work in the future,
• Interactions with your customer will use more online processes and procedures,
• Customer needs will change, they will want to know more,
• Government regulations,
• Your workforce will change and they will need to become more technology literate,
• There will be huge pressure on IT to do things faster.

Each of these in their own right will be challenging, but intertwined, so changing one will have implications on the other.

Everyone will need a good business strategy to move forward. We provide McKinsey's model "The Five Horizons" as a good overarching reference of the steps to move forward.

McKinsey’s The Five Horizons talks about the 5 stages it sees to getting restarted in the economy.

Having a good technology strategy to underpin the business strategy will be critical.

Being able to respond to the changing market will provide long term benefits as the market is likely to change many times even in the next 12 months.

The world has changed, the business has changed and those with insight will make the most benefit.

We understand and have helped many businesses with their strategy and we have also helped them deliver at lightning speed to adjust to the changing market.

Come and talk to us, it’s a free conversation!