The UK’s business landscape is at once a fertile, febrile and fanged. The UK is the home of the enterprise, the champion of small businesses and the maker of entrepreneurs; London remains a global financial hub despite the country’s severed connections with the EU. However, the UK faces a unique collection of issues – some of which relate to said severed connections –, which threaten the future of millions of businesses today.
As a business leader, you may be facing some specific challenges in your line of work. Alternatively, you may be looking at a general downturn in trade, and towards future-proofing your business. The answer lies, of course, in strategy. What strategic solutions can UK businesses employ for short-, medium- and long-term success?
Understanding Strategic Solutions
The term ‘strategic solution’ will rightfully catch flak from the more sceptical readers amongst you, on account of bearing relation to other examples of meaningless business-speak. To understand exactly what a ‘strategic solution’ is, it is first important to consider the problems that businesses face, particularly here in the UK; after all, a solution isn’t a solution unless it is solving something.
Of course, you needn’t look far to find problems ripe for solving. The UK’s exit from the EU has been an unmitigated disaster for international trade, and has created myriad difficulties from industry to industry – going as far as to impact consumer expenditure. But there are evergreen, internal problems afoot that you may also need to address in order to futureproof your business.
Types of Strategic Solutions
With these general areas in mind for ‘problems’, let’s look at some case studies, and exemplify some solutions. One strategic solution, for example, might involve increasing expenditure on market research. Falling profits can be attributed to a number of different reasons, but if you have isolated yours to falling consumer figures, then you have a disconnect between what you are offering and what your target audience wants or needs.
Another type of strategic solution might relate to the performance of your staff. The structure of your business will naturally incur some bottlenecks, but management around these bottlenecks can exacerbate slowdown. Proper tracking of employee productivity can reveal sources of slowdown, and give you relevant information with which to make necessary change.
Where problems are financial in nature, your solution may be as simple as the outsourcing of consultation to an expert third party – where individual suggestions can make a major long-term difference to financial structuring, regulatory compliance and even the basic legality of your enterprise.
Implementing and Measuring Success
Implementation of strategic solutions is a necessarily individual process. Every business is different, and the same can be said for the problems they face. Ultimately, you want to know that your solutions are as effective as you intend for them to be – which makes data and progress-tracking a fundamentally-important consideration. Where staff are concerned, KPIs are key; where finances are concerned, milestones, benchmarks and delegation rule.
