December 23, 2015
Change is never predictable especially in recent times with the financial crash of 2008 and subsequent recesssion. There are ways to create a resillient business, and in this blog post I am going to give you my top 4 tips on how to manage change in your organisation.
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If you take the economic crisis, when the recession hit a lot of people within the web industry were severely impacted and a majority of that was down to the fact that people were cutting their marketing budgets so they were spending less on their websites and digital assets.
The second thing that changed within the industry was a lot of people were made redundant as a result of the recession, which meant that the website design industry had an influx of freelancers who then became competition for our business. No-one couldn't have predicted that that was going to happen but we had to adapt to it.
These are accidental forces which are the hardest to predict and adjust to, things that happen within the economic climate and the economy outside of our industry and they're the factors which force us into making changes within our business.
What this allows you to do is to focus on your core competencies.
For a long time, we were a web design agency and we hosted our clients' websites. We used to do email hosting for our clients as well and we realised was that with the growth in use of mobile devices and smart phones, we ended up with four times the amount of support for what was technically a free service that we added onto our hosting package.
We knew that what we did best was design and host websites so therefore we outousrced all of the email support to a local IT company. It meant that our support calls dropped by 80% overnight once we outsourced our IT support. It was a painful process to move our customers across to the new provider; it saved us an awful lot of time and allowed us to focus on our core competencies.
Outsourcing allows you to deliver a higher level of service, delivered by specialists that maybe you won't or can't deliver yourself and this will build trust and gain respect with your clients.
We found that keeping projects simple meant you can deliver a better and higher quality of service to your clients.
For example, if you had a £10k project with a £50 support fee versus a £2,000 project with a £50 support fee but the £10,000 project takes 5 times the amount of time to deliver. It's the £50 per month fees that are going to create much more value for your business.
By focusing on a greater number of smaller businesses rather than fewer large businesses with those £50 per month fees adding up, it means that your baseline level of your business is very constant. When you have projects, your peaks happen above your baseline rather than below it.
We weren't sure how the recession was going to impact our business. We can try and plan for change by increasing our monthly support fees or making sure that rather than taking large project fees, that those fees are amortised over a number of months.
We can take that regular monthly income, which is coming into the business, and rather than taking drawings out of the business, we can reinvest some of that money back into our business. We can then use this investment to improve the service and level of quality that we're delivering to our clients and add further value.
The final way to plan for change is that we have to be willing to adapt to change when it happens, not IF it happens because change IS going to happen within your business. You can't predict WHEN it's going to happen but we want to make sure that we're ready for it when it does.
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