Why being agile could boost your business

Being flexible and responsivein uncertain times could bring huge gains to your company.

Being agile in today’s uncertain times is no mean feat. Being agile means a business has the ability to adapt, to change quickly, and to succeed – despite a rapidly changing, turbulent environment. It also requires a business to be able to think about both the good and the bad in order to reconfigure its strategy; to look at its processes, people and technology in order to create and protect value in the company. Although things are tough right now, ultimately agility has the potential to strengthen businesses.

Successful, agile companies are both stable and dynamic at the same time. In other words, if your business was a good business pre-COVID, it has the core components – including agility – to be a good business in a post-COVID world. This means opening the door to opportunities for growth, and giving value to your customers in an ever-changing environment. Businesses that come through this, will do so in a much stronger position. They’ll be more efficient and they’ll have much more robust strategies. And if they’ve supported their staff appropriately, they’ll have a more loyal and engaged workforce than before. That’s a great foundation to build on.

But being agile isn’t always easy; ninety per cent of senior executives see agility as being critical to the success of their organisation, according to a Deloitte survey of more than 10,000 people. The catch? Less than 10 per cent of those people believe their company actually is highly agile.

Here’s how to boost your business agility:

Create value in an evolving market

Agile companies are able to meet the evolving needs of customers, and reimagine how they create value. During lockdown, a local grocer who could no longer sell fresh food started to offer home-delivery boxes of luxury packaged foods to their usual customers in order to accommodate people’s changing needs, creating a value proposition for the people who had previously kept them in business. Not only did they save their business, they managed to become more profitable than before.

Plan ahead

By failing to adapt to a continuously changing marketplace, businesses can be left behind, so even if your business isn’t agile right now, chances are it will need to be at some point in the future. However, that doesn’t mean now is the right time for your business. You might not be ready to take on some of the challenges that come with being agile, or you might not have worked out to reconfigure your processes yet – and that’s ok. The key is understanding what it takes to be agile, and knowing that you have to commit wholeheartedly – if not now then almost certainly at some point in the future.

Find a good financial backer

Responding to market conditions means being able to move quickly – and that means having a flexible and responsive financial backer to help you. The grocer who wanted to deliver luxury hampers to customers needed a new warehouse for extra storage and a new refrigerated truck to be able deliver effectively and on time. Challenger business bank, Judo Bankis able to respond quickly to the emerging needs of a business because it gives every customer a dedicated business banker – no middle-men, no red tape. The result? Flexible and responsive financial backing means Australian businesses like yours are able to get the funds they need, when they need, in order to grow or adapt successfully.