Making business decisions in uncertain times can be difficult. There are a lot of things to consider and it can be hard to know what the right thing to do is.

However, by taking a few things into account, you can make decisions that will help your business grow and thrive in any situation.

Here are the A’s, the three tips for making smart business decisions during uncertain times.

• Firstly, Attitude, make sure it’s the right one
• Secondly, Assessment, understand and plan for what is going on
• Lastly, Action, inertia is not your friend

Conclusion

Making business decisions in uncertain times can be tough for business owners. It’s hard to know what the right thing to do is when you don’t have all of the information. That’s why we came up with three tips for making smart decisions during uncertain times.

The first one is attitude, make sure it’s the right one. You need to be positive and believe in your ability to succeed even if things are looking a little bleak. Secondly, assessment, understand what is going on around you so that you can make informed decisions. And lastly, action, inertia is not your friend. Don’t wait too long to take action or else you might miss out on opportunities. To learn more about these tips and how they can help your business thrive during uncertain times listen to our latest episode of the Small Business Success podcast. Thanks for listening

My gift to you, a free Numbers Know How Cash Flow Guide.   Check out my I Hate Numbers YouTube channel,  Subscribe to I Hate Numbers now so you don’t miss an episode.  My book, I Hate Numbers will change your relationship with numbers and money, in a good way.  Check out what people have said, buy the book and make your own mind up, you won’t be disappointed.

In business as in life, it would be wonderful to have a certain future, to know with a degree of confidence what the future holds. Planning is going to be much stronger, we have less anxiety and life would be wonderful. Unfortunately, business has never been about that. There are times when the future is much more uncertain than others. Cost may be going up, demand patterns change dramatically. The world around you seems to be falling about it. Is that an overspill into our state of being and it can affect our decision making. In this week's I Hate Numbers Podcast, I'm going to be talking about the three A’s of decision making when the future is uncertain.

You're 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. Welcome to another weekly episode on I Hate Numbers. This is the channel with a mission to improve your financial awareness, help you and your business make more profits, win more battles than you lose, for those battles that go on between your ears, give yourself the business that you aspire to. What's not to love about that? My name is Mahmood. I'm an accountant. I'm an educator, proud author of the book I Hate Numbers and I love to help my clients and people that I don't know. And over the last 28 plus years, I've helped thousands of businesses navigate the landscape and get closer to their numbers.

Let's crack on with this week's podcast. Now, the three A’s of decision making in uncertain times are attitude, assessment and action. Let's look at each one in turn. When the landscape looks very uncertain, when it's more volatile, costs are going up faster than you can anticipate, you're not quite sure how the economy is going to be behaving. There's doom and gloom all around you. It's very easy to slip into that panic, slip into that mode of thinking that the world is about to end.

And the years and sweat that you've spilt over building your business will suddenly come to a dramatic end. One key thing to pay attention to is to try and maintain a calm demeanour. Panic is nobody's friend in this situation. And when you're making decisions, however tough they may be, it's really important to make sure that your demeanour is calm, that you centre yourself. A sense of panic, understand, although it may be, helps nobody. And it spills over to your team, it spills over to those around you, and your decision making will be flawed as a result.

There are things that we can do to maintain outcome. So staying connected with nature, making sure that we sleep well, making sure that we maintain our food intake, don't go hungry and miss out your meals, exercise, connection with the outside world to some degree of activity, whatever it takes for you, make sure that you stay calm and don't bottle things up.

Apart from the calm that you need to navigate, whatever the landscape throws at you is you need to have a degree of resilience as well. Calm and resilience will be your best friends. The decisions may not lessen in terms of the toughness here, but you'll have greater clarity, the calmer that you are. You'll be able to see things more objectively. Your vision won't be clouded by information that you can't make sense of. Panic, again, is nobody's friend.

That's an extreme example, perhaps, but if you've ever seen those programmes on TV where people are in operating theatres, there's a life and death situation which our businesses aren't, but we have that life and death situation and in that very pressured environment, people stay calm and they're much more careful in making those decisions. There's a degree of detachment, not a big emotional investment and connection to that individual. They want to do their best to save that life.

And in your business, you need to have that degree of calm, detachment, and not to be overtly emotionally involved in the decisions that you've got to make, having looked at the attitude that you need in an ideal universe. And remember, you can slip up on these things. And we're not saying you have to be consistently calm, it's always desirable. But human beings, we are succumbed to having bad days and good days. Just make sure your calm days outweigh the panic days.

The next critical thing to do is about assessment. You cannot make anything meaningful, you cannot make any decisions about what you're going to do to manage costs, what you're going to do to try and reduce the costs that you've got, whether they're value added or not, which direction that your business is going into, decisions that you're going to make in terms of staffing, resources, any key decisions that you make for your business. You need to understand what's going on. An assessment of the situation is vital and this is where numbers, your best friend and business, can come to your rescue and help you greatly.

Now, what I sometimes find is that many business owners, when they start to do some assessment, evaluate their current situation, they get overloaded with data. We live in an information rich world and it's very difficult sometimes to identify what is good information, what is bad. For me, start with the answers to the questions that you need. That then determines the data, the information that you need to collect. So whatever's happening in your business sector, in a wider environment, not all businesses will be affected in equal measure.

So you need to look at what's going on and understand how it affects you in your particular business. When there's a hike in fuel costs, for example, that may not affect you as much. If your business is not heavily invested with having fuel as a major cost component. If you look at material prices and you're locked in to those material prices, then an increase in them may not have an immediate effect. It may affect consumer demand, but you may be dealing mostly with business to business. So what are the questions that you need answering in your own particular business that then gives you a focus as to the information that you need to gather?

Now, we are flooded with information. You need to have relevant data to understand the situation you're in, to evaluate, there are tools that you can have at your disposal. Check out the show notes and I can share some with you. So whether you do something called a pest analysis where you understand your costs, what they constitute in terms of your overall profitability, understanding what your profitability is by mix, by different product groups, understanding the variability and the sensitivity of those costs and prices, wondering how demand is going to be affected by what's going on.

So get the data, but make it relevant to the decisions and terms you're going to make, how your currency choice is affected and the options will come from that. Now, evaluating and understanding your situation is made even stronger if you assemble not as a it would be nice to be better and the central thing if you assemble and build a financial cash flow story. So, looking at the future, looking through the windscreen of your business, not the rear view mirror, what does the cash position look like for your business over the next, well ideally, twelve months.

Breaking down onto a month by month cycle. Putting into account what your business story will look like and translate that into cash. As a footnote folks, if you check out the show notes here, I'll give you a link to a free cash flow guide as well as a free trial to the numbers know how financial story platform. Let's get back to the podcast. So we're assessing the situation, we've got the right attitude that we're bringing to our A game. We're putting together a financial plan. That financial plan will give us options.

Once we know what that financial future looks like in cash terms, the whole shooting match, then it's easier for us to make those decisions as to what we're going to be doing. The final thing is you've got to take action. If you've got options which present themselves where you might have to effectively look to cutting down costs, eliminating things outside of the pipeline, looking at changing the direction your business is going to, having a slowdown communicating that to your customers,

whatever the points are, whatever the actions that you've got to take, you've actually got to do them. Inertia will help nobody least of all yourself and your business. Action is always going to trump inaction and inertia. So folks, let's summarise where we are. So we need the right attitude and attitude for me is calmness, resilience, and not to panic. Assessment - understand what's going on in your business. What other products and services that are generating value? What is your customer order book look like? What does the future look like? Have you got anything in the pipeline that you can accelerate, bring forward? Understanding the situation both outside of your business and within your business here helps you identify the path that you're going to tread going forward.

And lastly, take action. With a well built cash flow story plan, and that's the advice that I would recommend you do in whatever the circumstances you find yourself. If you don't have cash, your business will not carry on. So if you've got an understanding of what the cash looks like in your business going forward, when it arrives, when it leaves, what's causing the increases, what causes the volatility, then you can take appropriate action.

Pulling that altogether, folks, gives you a strong position to manage that element of uncertainty. Monitor and review your cash flow plan. Don't let it gather dust. Folks, I hope you found this podcast useful. I'd love to hear your comments or feedback. Ideally, I'd love it if you could subscribe and share that with your friends. Until next week, focus on your three A's. Think about your future, think about the options, and you'll be halfway there to having a road map to success.

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.