Top 5 ideas that companies can use to adapt financially to change
In the business world, change is inevitable. Some changes are small and easy to adapt to, while others are large and are more difficult to process. No matter what kind of change comes up, you’ll need to learn how to anticipate them and frame how you think about them. Learn our top five ideas that your company can use to adapt financially to any upcoming change.
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Organize and prioritize payments
Differentiate between the essential and less important costs over the next quarter, this will allow you to project where you need to be injecting your cash flow. Start by cutting any unnecessary expenses eating into your budget, these are key issues to business’ routinely overspending as you will be surprised at how much you are spending on operations when you take a closer look. Revise ways that you can be more cost savvy with expenditure whether it is looking at more efficient, low cost transportation, delaying replacements of equipment or requesting extensions from your suppliers until you have turned your financial instability around.
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Audit, re-organise & adjust
To rebuild your company, you may need to shift things around in order to make your team and operations stronger. Your staff and operations may not be as effective as they could be as a result of following old processes or lacking skills that are required for today’s business market. Have a professional come in to audit, and work with you to re-organize your business, inclusive of its business plan. What worked for you in the last three years, may not have worked for you this year. If you do not adapt to a world with industries, competitors, and channels of communications that are transforming all the time, your revenue stream is going to decline rapidly.
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Choose who you listen to
Monitor the market signals generated by the most interesting participants in your industry’s value network. For example, what new products is your fastest growing competitor working on? Which customer segments seem to be adopting your product the fastest?
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Focus on retaining & boosting customers
The best way to get yourself out of a financial struggle is a nice injection to your cash inflow. Analysing your current marketing and sales strategy to implement new strategies for boosting conversion will have a very positive effect on your revenue stream. Meanwhile, make sure to collect any outstanding payments owed to you. Cash could very likely be hiding in your accounts receivable without your knowledge and the importance of this cash boost is incremental.
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Hold yourself accountable for adapting to the new change
Whether the change has already gone into effect, or if it is still in the future, you can hold yourself responsible for how you will respond to it. It is helpful to think of this accountability in relation to time. The change may be deep, and will significantly change your workplace, or it may be a smaller change that will have less of an impact.
Think about and write down what you want your response to be towards the change. You should include how long it will take you to adapt fully to the change. For example, a major policy change may take a few weeks to fully implement. You should give yourself time to adapt to the policy but hold yourself accountability to following through on your goal.
Conclusion
Don’t panic as financial instability is something that many business’ experiences, however once through the troublesome phase, implement some cash flow forecasting strategies that will help you monitor financial progress more effectively to prevent this problem from reoccurring.
