With internet-shopping companies massacring High Street shopping, as Amazon, Asos and many others deliver internet orders to customers homes, every business needs to think not only of how technology will affect their business but, more probably importantly, how it will affect their customers’ business. You may think you’re immune from 21st Century technical advances, but are all your top 10 customers immune as well ?
A diversity of talent, ethnicities, gender and sex amongst your staff is strongly preferable, as various studies have shown that high performing teams are diverse, unafraid to embrace new things, new technologies and new ways of working. Significantly, the poorest performing teams tend to have the same type of person (age, gender, education and outlook).
One tip I have seen work well, to engender / facilitate a new attitude to change, is to move staff around, rotate them, so they do not get set in their ways. This will refresh your staff and force them to create new relationships with the work colleagues they now sit next to. By doing this, your staff reorganise their desks, have a clear out of old things and habits and facilitate a new outlook in the way they work.
A Cornerstone of every single business has to be to facilitate and either adopt or adapt changes into your own business. Twenty years ago everyone looked up to High Street retailers as successful businesses and pinched ideas from them (for example large window displays, Point Of Sale merchandise and electronic tills before that, for example). Now the High Street is being decimated, will your business be decimated or will one of your top 10 customer be decimated, or 2 or 3 of your customers ?
How will you respond when cars and lorries no longer need drivers for your deliveries ?
Can you see yourself losing 3 of your top ten customers in the next 5 years, as technology hits them …… and then you feel the impact of losing 1/3rd of your business?
Could this be realistic or a is it just fantasy ?
Think Again.