Preparing for Change

While there are a lot of basic things about our businesses which will not change - you will have to make a profit; you will have to find customers and serve them well; you will have to deliver value - many of the other things, including products, work and people, are much more likely to change now than they used to. Not only that, understanding and directing such change is often crucial for the success of the small business.

The key things to understand with regard to such changes are that you don't know what will change and you don't know how. This makes it very difficult to prepare for and deal with it successfully in any traditional, business process way.

Instead, you have to keep your business focused on what it does while consciously keeping it unfocused in what it can do. The rules of the game, the team members, the audience and even where it is played could change suddenly and only those who can deal quickly and nimbly with the changes are still going to be in the game.

One way to do this, is to diversify many aspects of your operations. Hire all kinds of employees, sign up a variety of sub-suppliers, get all kinds of partners and network with a wide range of business and other people. This means that you will find out about changes early and will be more likely to be able to find opportunities from such changes.

If, in addition to running your business, you are actively out there looking for changes in needs and attitudes while preparing your business partners and employees for changing circumstances, you'll know what is going on and how to deal with it while your competitors are still wondering what hit them. You'll have new plans in place while they are still trying to fix their old ones.

To read more about using diversification to succeed, try this link from Fast Company. It's a long article but with several good ideas and points of view.

For a more in-depth discussion of this subject try the "Growing Your Own Small Business" course at Suite University.

Featured Course: Growing Your Own Small Business

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