How Information and Communication helps Build your Business Resilience is this weeks theme. Last week’ we looked at what Business Resilience was, and how your leadership plays a big part.

Listen to find out more

How Information helps Build your Business Resilience

Firstly, we looked at the three parts of business resilience. Leadership information and communication. Further to that, and in addition we talk about information and communication in this episode of I Hate Numbers. To clarify, you as business owners are leaders in your own business.

Your gut feeling for making decisions is important, however, gut feeling alone is bonkers. Above all facts and good information drives effective decision making. Good information needs excellent record-keeping systems. You also need to that ability to understand, use and apply that information.

Listen to find out more

Why Communication helps Build your Business Resilience

In addition, your communication is the last part of your Business Resilience. How you communicate with your stakeholders, what to say, and how to say it is key.

What is good communication and why is it a key part of Business Resilience. Certainly, these questions and more are dealt with in this podcast episode.

Listen to learn more

In conclusion, we have seen what makes up your Business Resilience. To sum up, it's your leadership, information and communication. In short, it is not too late to learn and develop this for your business.

Want to learn more? Check out our Business Growth Club to move your business forward.

In This Episode

• Understanding the importance of Information for your Business Resilience
• Appreciating what good information is, and how to get it
• Being aware that effective communication is vital for your business
• What does good communication look like in your Business?
• Developing your own Numbers confidence and decisions
• Take more control of your numbers to help make you money, survive and thrive

Links

https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/proactiveresolutionss-podcast/id1500471288

https://play.google.com/music/m/I3pvpztpjvjw6yrw2kctmtyckam?t=I_Hate_Numbers

https://open.spotify.com/show/5lKjqgbYaxnIAoTeK0zins

https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/proactiveresolutionss-podcast

https://tunein.com/podcasts/Business–Economics-Podcasts/I-Hate-Numbers-p1298505/

You are listening to the I Hate Numbers Podcast with Mahmood Reza. The I Hate Numbers podcast mission is to help your business survive and thrive by you better understanding and connecting with your numbers. Number love and care is what it's about. Tune in every week. Now, here's your host, Mahmood Reza.

Hi folks, and welcome to episode 47 of I Hate Numbers. In episode 46 from last week, we talked about business resilience, more importantly, how to build your own business resilience, and the focus on last week's podcast episode was leadership. To complete this conversation, I want to talk about information and communication, which completes the component parts, the building blocks of what is required for you to be business resilient.

A slight recap from last week where we talked in terms of business resilience, not just being about mindset and attitude, even though that's important, but it's a practical device for you to not only weather the storm of uncertainty and turbulence in your business landscape, but to plow your way forward, and to build, and grow, and sustain your business. Information for me is gold.

It's the new gold, it's the new way to navigate a business in whatever condition that you actually are in. Resilient organisations value information, and they value the quality of that information. Some elements of that information feed into decision making, and it's not just the financial data and the financial transactions that are critical, but it gives a broader perspective for your business.

It's far better to base decision making on facts than opinions. Now, there's nothing wrong with gut feeling whatsoever, and there's nothing wrong with an opinion being expressed over something, but fundamentally, facts are the vital component parts in any decision making process. What that means is that for those facts about what's going on in your marketplace, what the financial data is saying about where your costs

are being incurred, how much profit you're making, which areas of your business need to be addressed, has got to be available in the here and now, not several weeks, several months into the future. There are many organisations that have thrived and have done well with that component of business resilience.

And remember, those organisations, which, even though things were very turbulent, things were hitting the fan, not only managed to navigate their path, but they actually prospered much better than their counterparts, or competition even within the same sectors. Now, for me, it's not just a question of having access to that information, even though that's the real key building blocks, but it's actually knowing what to do with that information as well.

I talked in terms of information in real time and in the many business transactions that flow through your business in terms of what you are spending, where the money's coming from, which customers are providing value, we cannot gain any insights into our business unless we can access that very readily and very easily.

If we want to challenge our costs, if we want to see which costs are adding value to our business, which ones are redundant, which ones we can delete, which ones we can invest more resources into, then we need to have some understanding of what is going on in the here and now, not waiting for that annual exercise where accounts are submitted in to be completed to keep the tax-man and the authorities happy.

Now, in terms of the systems that we need to capture, that market data, in terms of those systems that we need to keep an eye on supply data, financial transactions, how our competitors are doing, being able to respond, there is no excuse, in my opinion, for not having your business structured round a good effective digital management platform. The heavy lifting

of financial data, the heavy lifting of financial transactions, very much from the price of a cup of coffee to perhaps something more extravagant like a gin and tonic. There is no real excuse these days for even a modest solepreneur to large SME to actually set up a digital platform and capture not only the financial data that's going on, but actually link that to customer data,

competitor data, and produce a whole balance, range of information that's key. Those organisations that access that data in real time, those organisations that can synthesise and use that information to inform their decision making, respond and perform much better than their competitors. In addition to information,

you need good effective communication to be business resilient. For me, it was a very interesting exercise to observe those organisations that survived and prospered. What they had in their toolkit were very well developed communication strategies. Now, there are a few building blocks that contribute to good effective communication,

and this is the time that we can look at the things that have gone on before to make sure we have good communication plans. What are those things that constitute good communication? Well, speed of response certainly is one of those elements. If something is going on in our business that we think our stakeholders, we think our customers, our suppliers, the different broad of,

range of businesses and individuals that we deal with, if we don't react quickly to tell them what's going on in our own business, how it might affect them, we create a vacuum. We create a gap that gives the potential to others who might have their own personal take on things to share their views about what's going on,

and before we know it, we've got a lot of noise we're fighting, building up around us. Delay is not good for anybody. So, that speed of response is absolutely critical. Disseminating what's important for us, what's important for our stakeholders is critical to take the communication battle to those end users.

We've also got to think in terms of all the different stakeholders that are interacting with our organisation, typically, suppliers, customers, managers. There's the internal communication as well, as well as just the customer itself. So, speed is very important here. Again, the risk that we take if we delay on getting our messages out there, the delay in communicating what's going on,

the communicating where we see things developing. If we don't take the conversation to people, then the conversation comes to us and we're forever on the back foot. As part of that communication, I'm a big believer in authenticity and with the messages that you give out to people, don't try and be somebody else. A - because you'll find it very difficult to be anybody but yourself, but also, when your customers interact with you, when your suppliers interact with you,

they want to know in reality who they're actually dealing with. So, authenticity is as though that individual is sitting next to you being sincere as well. Many businesses I found during the turbulence of last year, in 2020, would share their pains. Not too openly, perhaps, not too much in terms of open communication, but there was sympathy, and as long as somebody who felt that there was some acknowledgement of what was going on, that was sufficient.

Obviously, there is issues with client confidentiality, but that's a topic for another show. Empathy is another attribute that business owners should be exhibiting. Doesn't necessarily mean that you have to agree with somebody that you're communicating with. It just means having an understanding and having some degree of humanity when you actually communicate those messages out to your stakeholders.

Being honest, being forthright, being straight, are great examples and great characteristics of good, effective communication. Evolving your team in those messages, making sure that you also communicate with your team and your staff is also a vital part and a component of a good communication strategy.

Whatever you communicate, be honest, have integrity, have empathy, be authentic, and those will serve you very well. Now, let me round up. We've taken these two podcasts together. Last week we talked about leadership being a vital component, and that was as much about your own business resilience. That was much about staying calm, that was as much about taking action.

We talked about the gazelle and we talked about the lion. Whatever, whichever you are, it’s to act quickly, act decisively, act positively. Bring it to the table. We need to have good information. We need to be able to access that data, that information very readily. We need to be able to synthesise and interpret that information quite clearly.

We need to take action. We need to communicate, and we need to be authentic. For me, if you put all those together, and there's no particular waiting, which is more important than the other, they all interact with each other, then you'll be a good way forward to developing and building your own business resilience.

Now, business resilience is a practical way of working, and businesses that are business resilient tend to weather storms much better than their counterparts. How to perform those companies that are not as resilient? So, leadership style, information and communication make great bedfellows. Okay, folks, hope you got some value from this particular podcast.

I'd like you all to think about your own leadership styles. What your own leadership in your own business is like? Do you have access to the information that you require in your business? Do you know what's going on? Could you readily tell me how much money you're making, which customers are delivering value?

Where your money's being spent? What the future looks like? What's going on with your competitors? How things are actually going on? Can you tell me now, as opposed to in several weeks time, what's your communication models and methodology like? Is it authentic? Do you communicate? Do you engage? If the answers are yes, then you are pretty much on the right path

to business resilience. Hope you got some value out this podcast. By all means, check out the show notes at the end where we'll give you some further links, and coming up we have the Business Growth Club that has its next intake opening up at the end of January. I'll give you some links in the show notes.

Until next week, have a fantastic week.

We hope you enjoyed this episode and appreciate you taking the time to listen to the show. We hope you got some value. If you did, then we'd love it if you shared the episode. We look forward to you joining us next week for another I Hate Numbers episode.