Kick starting your business again

As we slowly move out of lockdown we thought it would be useful to share some ideas on kick-starting your business again.

1. Understanding the key issues
   This may seem obvious but determining the root cause of that is undermining your performance beyond “lockdown” is a great starting place.Start by evaluating your sales activity and ask yourself some simple questions;
   • Have your customers changed their buying habits?
   • Is my market offer still what is required?
   • Has the competition changed its approach or launched new products or services?
   • Are the sales team fulfilling our customer’s requirements?

2. Develop a response and learn from it
   Once you’ve identified the root cause, you need to respond in the right manner. It is important that you remain positive, be willing to adapt and learn. Even if you resolve the initial crisis, don’t just forget it and move on but adopt a learning mindset for future issues.
   • Consciously learn from it and look at how it could have been prevented.
   • If customer behaviour changed, think about how you can manage this more effectively next time.

3. Resist becoming too interventional
   Business leaders and owners are usually focused, driven and instinctive problem solvers. If your sales growth stalls, it’s tempting to seize the reins and fix everything single-handedly, but resist this, if you do manage to resolve it, the chances are this will only be a short term solution as you haven’t resolved the underlying cause.You need to concentrate on the bigger picture. Longer-term success is dependent on the economy, the external market, your supply chain and your customers. What investment, capacity, infrastructure and skills will be required and how will they be secured?

   You can’t answer these questions single-handedly. Every business belongs to a much larger ecosystem, so it’s important to have the support of external networks that will help you acquire greater insight. A better business overview will help you solve both today’s and tomorrow’s problems.

4. Use Your team
   What you need to kick start your growth break is to harness your resources and collaborate in creating the solution. A collaborative environment for problem-solving demonstrates strong leadership far more than a top-down approach. If you feel that your management team needs development or is not getting the job done, you may find that: our Management Academy may be able to help

Our team at BHP Consulting all run successful businesses, we understand that businesses are unique and our approach involves sharing this experience to improve your business. For an initial telephone conversation or face-to-face meeting, click here