When businesses face economic uncertainty in a competitive environment, it can be difficult to know whether the right decisions are being made to ensure a stable future for the company and its team.
While focusing on what you know and what you're already successful at may seem like the obvious choice, it's also important to recognize when you see a good opportunity to bring in additional revenue. This could be the key to elevating your core business, keeping your brand at the forefront of your industry, and preserving the first impression for existing and potential customers. Here, 16 experts from the Fast Company Executive Board each share one strategy that can help company leaders future-proof their businesses in a volatile market.
1. Retain top talent and focus on their professional growth.
Expand your capabilities and service lines and make the necessary investments in resources, tools, and subject matter experts to provide even more value. Be proactive in retaining top talent, as they are what drive your business forward. Focus on their growth, development, and overall satisfaction. – Martha Marchesi, JK Design
2. Take market news with a pinch of salt.
Don't take everything you read or hear from the media about the general market with a pinch of salt. Market predictability is constantly changing, so learn to filter out the noise and distractions and be focused and confident in your evaluation and due diligence. Be careful when learning expert opinions. Apply only what is relevant to you and evaluate the risks to your business. – Fatima Al Dosari, Qatar American Cultural Institute
3. Try to solve a specific need.
Align your business to focus on a specific need and be relentlessly focused on solving that need. Then pour your resources, innovation, and strategy into this single area. Focusing on solving one real, proven problem in the market with relentless precision will enable your business to survive and lead in a volatile environment. – Greg Sobiech, Delve
4. Embrace change and strengthen your company's structure.
I don't think there is any way to future-proof a business. The only thing you can do is make your business as “antifragile” as possible – that is, expose your company to as many small threats as it can withstand without breaking. Make change the norm. Small shocks strengthen the structure of your company, making it more likely to survive in the face of larger ones. – Yusuf Sar, Hardwarewartung 24 GmbH
5. Maximize the creativity of your entire team.
Harness the collective creativity of leaders, managers, and employees across your value chain. To innovate, you need creativity across your entire company. This is especially true in disruptive, volatile, and rapidly changing conditions. That means every member of your company's team is focused on a common purpose and vision, and has the right amount of freedom to adapt, invent, and disrupt the status quo. – Steven Kowalski, Steven Kowalski Creative License (™) Consulting Services
6. Use cultural intelligence insights to understand behavior and code-shifting.
Leaders who want to de-risk innovation in times of disruption must leverage cultural intelligence to use insights to understand behaviors and make code shifts to ensure product relevance. Culture acts as the source code for innovation: as a compass to navigate trends, a magnet to create a compelling brand universe, or an anchor to balance the familiar and the new. – Sam Hornsby, Triptk
7. Be consistent with your view and vision for the future.
Consistency in vision and brand is essential, especially in times of rapid change. Having a credible perspective and vision for the future that is not easily altered by fads will pay dividends in the long run. People often overestimate the rate of short-term change and follow fads and trends. In reality, most businesses evolve at a relatively measured pace. – Paul Brody, EY Blockchain
8. Take calculated strategic risks before the revolution begins.
Recognizing soft demand signals is necessary. Strategy, product, or technology shifts can take time, so pay close attention to hints and nuances and act on them. Embrace early information about potential shifts and actively track them, but don't wait too long to act. If you wait until a full-blown revolution occurs, it will be too late, so you need to take calculated strategic risks. – Esther Kestenbaum Prozan, Flowspace, Inc.
9. Streamline workflow processes to increase efficiency.
To future-proof your business with lean operations in a volatile market, prioritize efficiency in all processes. Streamline workflows, minimize waste, and optimize resource use. This lean approach increases flexibility, enabling your business to adapt quickly to market changes while staying on a strong, sustainable footing. – Ryan Crownholm, Ryan Crownholm Crown Capital Adventures Inc.
10. Raise awareness and share data-driven insights.
Raise awareness about the factors that create a volatile market and bring all stakeholders together to share external factors and data-driven insights about your business. Get everyone aligned to define your strategy, take proactive measures to manage cash flow, identify weak spots within your organization and determine how to protect them without reaching your limits in a tough market. – Kaitki Agarwal, A5G Networks, Inc.
11. Put existing customers and products first.
Volatility in the market requires stability within a company. To future-proof your business, you need to find the right balance of focusing on existing customers and strengthening your existing products before investing in new areas. – Vineet Jain, Egnyte Inc.
12. Communicate clear goals and ensure team alignment.
Build your business to be agile and scalable. Give your team a clear understanding of your goals and what you're doing to achieve them. Always work with the business as well as within it, making sure you make the small changes necessary to future-proof your company. – Alexander Kwapis, The Wild Dirt
13. Interview customers, partners, and employees to get a better perspective.
One of the most powerful ways to future-proof your business is to establish a strong business communications plan. This includes making a significant effort to interview customers, partners, and employees to hear their problems, needs, and perspectives. Use this insight to adapt service, innovation, and high-impact communications that resonate and show you're thinking about the future, not just the present. – Kathleen Lucente, Red Fan Communications
14. We are committed to being an equal innovation partner with our customers.
In today's volatile market, the key to future-proofing our business is our commitment to be an equal partner in innovation with our customers. This approach enables us to seamlessly integrate emerging trends and technologies into our existing framework, ensuring smooth transitions and delivering value-driven solutions that help build sustainable and lasting businesses. – Dharmesh Acharya, Radixweb
15. Establish revenue diversification to sustain your core business.
Revenue diversification is important, and not just in volatile markets. Tough economic times make service revenue hard to predict, so we are growing two new lines of business internally. Increasing revenue from non-service activities allows us to provide diversified market services (and therefore revenue) to our core business while stabilizing our overhead costs. – Mack McKelvey, SalientMG
16. Start buying technology in smaller bundles of features based on your team’s usage.
A volatile market is not the best time to invest in a new system, but sometimes you have to make the switch. A new architecture called microservices lets companies buy technology in smaller bundles of functionality, often on a pay-as-you-go basis (where the cost varies depending on how often you use it). Instead of paying for features that are rarely used, they can align their technology spend with how they use the technology. – Christina Robbins, Digitech Systems
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