With the number of new technologies growing daily and customers becoming more demanding, small businesses face fierce competition. How can your small business ensure its lasting viability in such a fierce survival of the fittest?
The following are some simple strategies to safeguard your business’s long term sustainability.
Focus on your core business
To prepare for the future, focus on what your business does best. Avoid making the same mistakes as other business who become so distracted by product extensions and diversification that they compromise their brand identity. What seem like unique opportunities for expansion may end up reducing the quality and profitability of everything your business excels at.
Ensure the value your product or service provides is clear to current and potential customers because if the business can’t define its value, its stakeholders definitely won’t be able to either. By investing in developing the core brand, businesses can nurture the brand into success and define a clear set of brand values that naturally differentiate it from competitors.
A strong brand accompanied by distinct brand values are some of the key factors in preparing any business for future success.
Business planning
A traditional business plan is a written document that describes all aspects of the business and includes a business’s objectives, strategies, sales, marketing, and financial plans. However, with digital as the norm, having a single written copy to represent the entirety of your business is more and more a thing of the past. Increasingly relevant now is having a concise and flexible business plan, adaptable to changes in the market, technology, or society as a whole.
That being said, the principles behind traditional business planning still hold true. It is meant to serve as a concrete outline of your business that clearly communicates the original purpose of the business, ways to spot potential problems that your business might face, and defines measurable objectives as well as controls to track progress in achieving them.
Updating your business plan regularly is important to define what your business wants to achieve over the next 12-15 months. When used effectively, a flexible and lean business plan can serve as a strategic roadmap for future growth and success.
Use data and technology intelligently
You should pick the software that is right for your particular business’s needs, be it financial software, CRM or social media management. Another important step is to use the data collected from these applications to inform the decisions your business makes on a daily basis.
Although the sheer quantity of data collected can be overwhelming especially for small businesses that face time and resource constraints, applications like Google Analytics are useful tools that can help save time and money in interpreting this data.
Having the right software in place while staying up-to-date with emerging technologies are useful strategies for future-proofing your business.
Cash flow forecasting
Accurately planning and managing your cash flow is an integral part of any business plan. A cash flow forecast shows how much money will go into and out of your bank account in the future.
It’s different than simply checking your bank account for the current balance as it allows you to predict your balance over the coming weeks, months, or years by factoring in all the money, such as bills and invoices, that moves through your business over a set period of time. Using this information, a cash flow forecast enables your business to both make plans to anticipate cash deficiencies and determine the best time to exploit smart growth and investment opportunities.
A cash flow forecast is a useful way of planning for the future of your business as it helps to identify if you will have the right amount of cash at the right time. You can make a cash flow forecast yourself using a template which you should then update every time you consult your forecast, or an easier and more cost-effective approach is using a cash flow forecasting app like Float that uses the numbers from your existing accounting software to effortlessly predict and display your forecast, no data entry needed.
Know your competition
Keeping up-to-date with competitors can help your business stay one step ahead of changes in the marketplace. Performing regular competitor analyses will keep your business aware of new competitors as well as highlighting why competitors fail. When looking at competing firms, pay attention to product offerings and the type of customers that typically choose them over your own business.
Your business can use this knowledge to build a thorough understanding of how your brand beats the competition which you can use in your marketing and advertising efforts.
This is a guest post by Float, for more information visit floatapp.com.
