Three Ways To Optimize Your Business During Uncertain Economic Times
By Banoo Behboodi, Vice President of Advisory Services
These are uncertain and unpredictable times, something I see every day as I work with professional services businesses in my role on Kantata’s Advisory Services team. No one knows exactly what lies ahead, but business leaders are already changing their behaviors, and their plans, based on a high degree of confidence that there is turbulence ahead.
Recently, I helped kick off a four-part series of LinkedIn Live events alongside Kantata’s Managing Director of Marketing Service & Agency Practice Brent Trimble and Brand Evangelist Charles Gustine. These sessions are designed to provide insights into ways professional services businesses can prepare themselves for whatever the economy has in store.
This first session, How to Optimize Your Business During Uncertain Economic Times, discussed how businesses are facing cost pressures as they fight to preserve margins and why now is the time to be proactive by aligning your IT spending with business priorities, nurturing your existing customer base, and optimizing your resources.
The following is just one of many topics we covered in the LinkedInLive session – click here to watch the entire session recording.
What are some of the biggest challenges PS firms are grappling with right now?
This was one of several questions posed during the session, and in my own experience and in my interactions with clients working to succeed in the industry right now, there are three critical challenges standing in the way of optimization.
The first challenge is creating transparency throughout your business.
Handling cost pressures and having much better control over your margins is critical in a recessionary climate. But having transparency into and across your business operations down to the point of having actionable detail is difficult for many organizations, and we commonly see a lack of transparency holding back performance when we interact with professional services organizations. That usually comes from having both disparate processes and disparate technology that create siloed ways of working. Getting timely, accurate insights to decision-makers so that they can be proactive instead of reactive is not always possible in those situations, and where it’s not teams are left to make decisions based on their gut (or worse, not make any decision at all). This is why it’s so important to find and address the blind spots, data silos, and process gaps that hold your business back and limit predictability.
The second challenge in professional services today is resource management.
Professional services organizations are trying to understand how to better predict demand for their resources and make sure their workforce capacity is aligned with that demand. A recent Kantata-sponsored forecasting survey with the Resource Management Institute highlighted that half of businesses cannot forecast resources accurately beyond 2 months, while best practice forecasting accuracy according to RMI should go at least 6 months out.
Having the tools and the process to know where your demand is, where your capacity can fulfill that demand, and where you have skill gaps and how to fill those gaps most cost effectively is a challenge we see in a lot of businesses – one that needs to be addressed for your business to stay ahead of demand.
The third challenge is lack of focus.
Part of this comes from the fact that companies are sometimes very reactive. When you’re responding to chaos, you’re often going in too many different directions. Having focus and prioritization around understanding and responding to customer needs, your colleagues’ needs, and understanding how to put your colleagues in a position to respond to customer needs while also advancing their careers and ensuring they are content and happy with the job they have is critical for professional services.In services, your talent and your workforce are your lifeblood, and I don’t think businesses are always focused on this.
I thought my Professional Services Pursuit podcast co-host Brent Trimble put it well when he added that it is time for every professional services organization to create rigor, measurement, and insight in their business. If you can’t currently forecast resource needs or project revenue accurately beyond 2 months then it is important for your business to work to obtain that foresight and predictability. It’s evident that in a time of uncertainty, our decision-makers need that illumination on the best path forward for the business the most.
Optimize Now and Continue To Succeed
In this time of economic uncertainty, it’s critical to take steps that strengthen your business so that you’re in your best shape to weather potentially unstable markets. Learn more from experienced professionals by watching the “How to Optimize Your Business During Uncertain Economic Times” session now, and be sure to sign up for more LinkedIn Lives from Kantata in the coming weeks.