Organizations that want to take advantage of upcoming social, economic, and technological transformations must do more than simply create great products. To ensure your enterprise goes from strength to strength while making the most of potential disruptions, you’ll need to future-proof your business.
Read this guide to better understand what future-proofing your business means and find out 7 actionable strategies that you can use to ensure your organization is ready for tomorrow’s world.
What Is Future-Proofing?
Simply put, future-proofing is the process of anticipating future events and developing plans to minimize the fallout from unforeseen circumstances while taking advantage of opportunities.
This type of strategic planning looks at ways to ensure that a business prospers in the long term. It considers the company’s strengths and weaknesses, while ensuring that the entity is able to overcome potential threats and take advantage of future opportunities.
Future-proofing is imperative for ensuring that your organization is prepared for a variety of unforeseen events, like technological developments or economic shifts. This is especially important when you’re running a business during times of constant change.
7 Ways to Future-Proof Your Business
1. Perform a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) Analysis
When you’re tackling a complex problem like future-proofing, it’s sometimes best to go back to basics. Performing a SWOT analysis to understand your enterprise’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats is a great place to start.
This helpful tool can help you to figure out what your company is doing well right now, where it can improve, and how you can prepare for the future.
It’s likely that you’ve carried out a SWOT analysis at some stage during your business journey, but it’s helpful to revisit these evaluations every once in a while. The constantly changing business landscape means that new challenges and opportunities arise all the time and you want to ensure that your organization is equipped to take advantage of them.
2. Consider Your Customers
Customers are the lifeblood of any business. To ensure that your operation is able to grow, you need to understand what your customers need and want now, as well as how that might change in the future.
Implementing a tracking system to monitor customer behavior will give you better insight into how your buyers interact with your brand. It can also help you to identify shifts in how they shop or the products or services they’re buying. This information is extremely useful when it comes to predicting how these metrics might change in the future.
3. Keep On Top of Tech
Identifying and harnessing technologies that may improve your employees’ and customers’ experiences goes a long way to ensuring your enterprise is future ready.
Take a look at your operations and figure out where you can introduce automations. Using solutions that take care of routine tasks will free up employees’ time and enable them to focus on more impactful strategic tasks that move you towards your greater business goals.
For your customers, you’ll want to focus on deploying programs that create frictionless shopping and checkout experiences. For example, giving your customers a range of payment methods to choose from makes checkout easy and reduces cart abandonment.
4. Diversify Your Business’s Offerings
When you were first starting out in business, you may have been given the following advice: Do one thing and do it well.
While it is wise to choose a niche and develop products or services that delight your target audience, diversification can often mean the difference between success and failure when change sweeps through an industry.
That said, you don’t want to go too broad. Monitor consumer behavior trends and identify opportunities that are relevant to – and can potentially augment – your existing operations. For example, Amazon created Amazon Logistics to ship packages and freight to decrease costs, reduce their reliance on third-party providers, and speed up delivery times.
5. Go with a Growth Mindset
As much as you can strategize and project, the future is unfortunately uncertain and even the best laid plans can go awry. In these instances, it’s your ability to respond to the unforeseen circumstances that makes all the difference.
Having a growth mindset – and imbuing this into your business culture – ensures that you’re able to use challenges to develop. Viewing novel problems as an opportunity to learn is a great way to ensure that you and your organization are able to evolve.
A commitment to continuous learning will ensure that your business is able to tackle and take advantage of unpredictable difficulties to ensure your business thrives.
6. Structure for Sustainability
Like agility, sustainability should be a golden thread that runs through all of your business practices.
Enhancing sustainability status can be challenging for a going concern. Again, it’s important to establish an overall sustainability vision, identify long-term objectives, and break these down into more manageable goals.
Your plan should balance people, profit, and the planet. Actions like creating an inclusive business culture, attracting new investments, and minimizing carbon emissions are a few examples of items that can be included in your sustainability strategy.
7. Protect Your Business from Payment Fraud
Ecommerce sales drive billions of dollars in payments every day. With all of that money flying around, it should come as no surprise that online sellers are a favorite target for cybercriminals.
Fortunately, there are a variety of tactics you can use to detect and prevent ecommerce fraud and keep your customers’ data safe during transactions while minimizing the cost to your business.
