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Change your business through change

All business organisations, especially entrepreneurial small firms, must cope with an ever changing business environment. However, small firms have a very limited ability in being able to control and relate to changes in the environment, although this can depend on the context of change. For example, if a major customer changes increases its order, the entrepreneur should be able to predict events and actions with regard to the timing and consequences of such a change and forecast any changes in the required resources and cashflow. Given this, the entrepreneur can undertake rational short-interval planning activity in order to underpin organisational control.

However, much of the change facing business today is largely unpredictable in terms of its timing and its consequences. In other words, such change is open-ended, with it often being unclear what is changing or why it is changing. For example, the effect of the 9/11 bombing of the World Trade Centre was largely unexpected and its consequences for individual businesses could not be clearly determined. Under such operating conditions, sustainable business development can therefore only be effected by the entrepreneur ensuring that systems are in place that can facilitate identification and understanding of such change situations as a basis for determining appropriate internal adjustment activity within the small firm.

However, this is not to say that programmes cannot be introduced to improve the growth prospects of businesses, although many firms are sceptical whether such initiatives can be successful or not. For example, there is a new business support programme called Sirius run by Ruthin based Dr David Keefe. This has had outstanding results in England and has recently been introduced in Wales thanks to funding from WEFO. Having talked to a number of businesses which have introduced Sirius, they find that it has been enormously beneficial in enabling them to ‘think outside the box’ and to look to more focused ways of making their business more effective and efficient

Another programme that has the potential to make a real difference to growing businesses in Wales is the Inspiring Success programme, run by SA Partners. This programme has been designed for one simple purpose, namely to help businesses organisation outperform the market in which they operate. Most importantly, this programme draws on exhaustive, rigorous and groundbreaking research compiled over a number of years, which has the ‘DNA of outstanding companies’ to be identified. Indeed, the main inspiration for the Inspiring Success programme is the world-class study on high performance called 'Good to Great' conducted by Jim Collins in 2001. This excellent study looked at businesses that had made the leap from ‘good to great’ and sustained those results for over a decade an half, consistently outperformed the market in an endurable and sustainable way.

Like the Sirius programme, there is not one prescribed method for helping businesses and the Inspiring Success project designs and develops a tailored programme that fits with the different goals of each client, providing the practical help required to help the business to succeed in the future. Therefore, if you think that you want to take your business to the next level of success and enable to perform effectively over the long term, why don’t you consider getting either the Sirius or SA Partners to come in and have a chat with you about what they can do. It may be one of the best investments in time that you or your business could be making to ensure its future success.

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