As we have seen forecasting the future has come to be an art rather than a science, … and an art without too much accuracy.
You only need look at the performance of recent polls for the past elections and of course the numerous differing predictions of the economy’s performance following Brexit.
Only last week I reflected on the predictions of the bank of England predicting challenging issues for the economy and now we have PWC predicting that Brexit will have little effect on the economy and it may produce a positive long term future.
What do we know for sure?
Well we can be sure that businesses will adapt to trading conditions and the strong will survive and the weak (maybe maybe not) but that’s not unusual in any trading environment.
In any case I think that businesses should be examining the pillars of any business. That’s not to say these are the finite ones but it’s a good start
People – have you got the right people in the right place. Do you need to recruit or can you outsource and bring in short term expertise to give the business an injection or kick start?
Sales – How do you improve the sales from your existing customer base, how do you get more customers
Costs – how much does it cost to run the business, what are your minimum costs for just producing selling one item, when did you last actively engage with your suppliers
Competition – how are they doing, can you learn lessons from them, how do they do what they do
Most would argue that this should happen throughout the business cycle ad I dare say it does to a greater or lesser extent but is it always done by the same people internally and surprisingly no change is made.
Using someone who doesn’t have a vested interest in not upsetting the boss / board / shareholders / colleagues is probably a better bet and so would recommend thinking about who would do the review first – should they be internal or external