With a period of slow economic growth forecast, and small businesses being crucial to the UK economy, business resilience has never been more important. While many businesses see increasing sales as their main priority, doing this without building resilience won’t achieve sustainable growth. In the 2007-08 recession, the businesses that fared the best were those that were scalable, not the ones that were the fastest growing.
We recently stress-tested the resilience of UK small business owners in five key areas – mindset, cash flow, people, clients and adaptability. Central to the findings was one common theme – change. The most resilient small businesses are better able to anticipate and exploit change, as well as adapt to it.
We’ve combined the results from these five key areas, and the advice of UK small business experts on how business owners can become more resilient, to create a guide to sustainable growth. The guide is filled with essential advice, tips, and tricks from:
- Emma Jones, Founder of Enterprise Nation
- Rory MccGwire, Founder of Atom Content Marketing and its six Donut Websites
- Jason Neale, Managing Director of The Agency Works
- Kelly Molson, Founder of Mob Happy and Co-founder of Rubber Cheese
- Paul Bulpitt, Co-founder of The Wow Company and Head of Accounting at Xero UK
- Peter Czapp, Co-founder of The Wow Company and The Agency Collective
Anticipating, responding and recovering from disruptive events will always be a feature of our business landscape, but resilience is much more than this. It is also about making sure small businesses can prosper over longer timeframes by evolving to remain relevant, viable, and competitive.
We strongly believe it’s imperative that small business owners focus on increasing their resilience if they want to sustain business success in the long-term. Those that focus on their infrastructure are much more likely to be successful in the long term.
