Hit ‘reset’: how to recalibrate your SMB goals for the second half of the year
Time to read: 3 minutes
As we learnt in 2020, business disruptions — lockdowns or otherwise — can often reveal challenges, but also new opportunities to refocus and innovate. Which means business goals set in January likely require a mid-year recalibration. But how is that best achieved? How can your SMB reset on the run?
Here’s how to adjust goals, build agility and make the second half of 2021 as strong, if not better, than the first.
Start with the basics: your wellbeing
When you’re a SMB leader, one of the business’s most important resources is you. That means your first step should be making sure you have the right wellness foundations as you move through the rest of the year.
During our webinar on this topic, Tim Hoopmann, a speaker and trainer from Beyond Blue, began with a reminder that leaders of businesses must do all they can to ensure they’re in a healthy mental and emotional space before they begin resetting strategic business plans.
“When you’re thinking about your business, when you’re starting to do your planning, wellness and mental health has to become a really important part of it,” Hoopmann said.
“So yes, we have to think about all the other strategic elements of our business, but wellness is really important.”
Beyond Blue has create a variety number of free resources for small business owners, including:
- A guide to help small business owners identify and alleviate stressors in their business
- A personal wellbeing plan
- A workplace wellbeing plan
- Mental health coaching
In addition to these resources, Beyond Blue has launched NewAccess for Small Business Owners. NewAccess for Small Business Owners is a free and confidential mental health coaching service for small business owners to help manage stress and improve wellbeing.
Use tech to enhance your business
When you’re centred on the needs of people — namely, your employees and your customers — it helps make your SMB easier to interact with and creates more fulfilling roles for staff.
It very much depends on the business itself, but this might also involve technology and digital tools that automate repetitive, resource-intensive, low-value tasks and processes.
“There’s this acceleration … to digital business models,” says Merlin Luck, Regional Vice President for SMB Australia at Salesforce. “It’s happening faster than ever.”
“Sixty percent of consumer interactions are now digital. That’s up from around 40% just a year ago … and what we’re seeing is that growing businesses have tech at the core. So growing businesses are 38% more likely to have tech underpinning their customer acquisition strategy. Thirty-three percent will likely have tech underpinning employee productivity.”
Without tech at the core, Luck says, it’s difficult to meet shifting customer and employee expectations. And by letting technology manage some of the more monotonous tasks, you and your team are freed up to focus on the higher-value work. Find solutions that can help you grow and scale your business not just in the latter half of the year, but also for the longer road ahead.
Along the same lines, never forget the human face of change
It’s easy for us to focus on technological change but, as essential digital workflows are introduced into a business, it’s vital to consider the human element.
“There’s a lot of talk about the perfect stack,” Hoopmann says. “But strategically look at it and make sure you understand the impact that it will have on the individuals, teams, and also your customer, before you blindly run at it and bring it all in.
“Make sure you think about the impact on people.”
Erin Adams, Product, Compliance and Industry Engagement Manager at Xero, agrees. “The end goal is to make it easier for your clients and customers to be able to purchase your services or buy your products.”
“It’s really important that you go back, talk to them about the process and how it’s been. Because if it’s not working for them, it doesn’t matter if it’s working on the back end, you’re not achieving the goal.”
Investigate new expectations — inside and outside your business
There are some universal trends, including 88% of customers who expect companies to accelerate their digital initiatives. But, ultimately, your customers are unique, which requires keeping close tabs on their changing needs and expectations.
Adams says Xero looks to customer feedback to stay tapped into shifting expectations.
What’s most important, she says, is to listen deeply to customer feedback both from the customers and from frontline staff.
An essential ingredient of growth, she says, is adapting processes and planning around feedback. At the same time, come up with pertinent questions for yourself and for the business to create your own feedback.
“Why are you in business?” Adams asks. “If you had a greater plan, are you still reaching that goal? Are you aligning your business with that goal?”
“Are the processes … being streamlined? And if they’re not, what in the process is broken? What isn’t helping achieve that? What tools do I need to be putting in place?”
Challenge yourself to change
One of the biggest drivers of change resistance, Adams says, is the “sunk cost,” or the amount spent on something in the past being the reason you’re hanging on to it today.
“If this year and last year have taught us anything, [it’s that] sunk cost is something we should be trying to eliminate out of the system,” she says.
So this is an excellent time to consider what we’re holding on to. Does it hold true value, or are we holding on to it because of what it has cost us in the past?
It’s not just the COVID-19 pandemic that is driving quick change. Technology has been sparking disruption and necessitating agility for years. In other words, even the smartest business strategies can be outpaced by the rate of change. A solution may have made sense three years ago, but shifting gears rapidly is increasingly necessary for business survival.
So what’s next?
Luck says a business must avoid implementing a tech strategy in a reactive fashion. Instead, they should craft a new business plan to ensure they’re not creating “a Frankenstein of cobbled together applications”.
“What is the business strategy? What role does technology play to work hand-in-hand with that business strategy?” he says. “Build that cohesive technology roadmap off the back of that, so that you have a tech stack that works together and you have a platform at the core of your business with all of the people, all of the functions of your business connected.”
Outside of technology, consider what drives your business, the outcomes that define productivity, Adams recommends. Particularly as people are working from home, it’s vital to focus on and develop new KPIs for the things that matter. This allows staff to adjust to the pressures of their home lives whilst also focussing on “bite-sized chunks” that lead to those essential outcomes, during the periods they’re working.
With that new focus, it means when people return to work they’ll likely have a better idea of how to streamline processes so they can do things bigger and better than they did before, Adams says.
Finally, Hoopmann says, always be kind to yourself.
“As a small business owner, you're the greatest asset in your business,” he says. “You've got to take care of that asset.”
“Taking care of yourself is not a selfish act. I see so many small business owners focus on everybody else and not take care of themselves. So my advice is to take care of yourself ... in doing that, you then place yourself in the best possible position to support others around you.”
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