How to improve business resilience

Forward Thinking Business Blog –

The concept of business resilience is attracting a lot of attention at the moment. One of the best definitions is by BSI, the UK national standards body. It describes resilience is ‘the ability of an organisation to anticipate, prepare for, respond and adapt to incremental change and sudden disruptions in order to survive and prosper’. As businesses across the island of Ireland, prepare for Brexit, this ability has never been more important.

Four ways to increase business resilience

1. Leadership and strategy

Your vision and business plan are crucial. Everyone in the organisation needs to understand your core vision and everyone is accountable for delivering this strategy. Now is a good time to check that the goals you set for yourself and your employees support this. Individual goals should be monitored on a continuous basis to keep everyone on track.

Remember that your strategic planning should include succession planning. FPM sometimes sees clients failing to take account of the tax consequences of succession planning decisions in family businesses. As well as securing the continuity of the business, a key objective should be to safeguard your personal financial independence and security. So, before you finalise succession and asset transfer objectives, it’s important to consider tax planning.

2. Operational resilience

Your organisation’s operational resilience is the ability of your people, processes and systems to react effectively to disruption or change. Controlling your costs and optimising operations in line with your strategic priorities is very important. The better you understand how to manage these aspects of your business, the more resilient you will be. Keep areas such as tax, supply chain, regulatory and legal issues should under constant review and remember to look for opportunities as well as solutions to problems. FPM is working with a number of clients who are exploring strategic alliances to mitigate their potential supply chain and market Brexit-related risks.

Contracts should be reviewed, particularly long-term contracts, to ensure that they will continue to be fit for purpose post-Brexit.

Location, logistics and financing should be other top priorities. You can strengthen your operational resilience by identifying the potential crises that could affect your business, grading these risks according to the impact they would have and then implementing a plan to manage the risks. I discussed this in more detail recently in a blog titled, Understanding Business Continuity Planning.