We asked our team: ‘what is the one thing that business owners and leaders should ensure they focus on as Covid-19 restrictions lift’?
Here’s what Paul Aisthorpe told us:
We must be sure that we are looking forward.
Over the past 15 months, I have given consistent and positive encouragement to my clients to think as far ahead as they possibly could, whilst staying true to our client-led approach and supporting them with dealing with the day-to-day business tasks and challenges.
Adopting a ‘batten down the hatches’ approach is quite a natural default against a totally new set of challenges that we’ve never come up against before. Businesses have been making every effort to remain operational against all odds and to try and remain strong throughout all the uncertainty of the pandemic and lockdown.
Now is the time that we must make sure, if we haven’t been already, that we are looking firmly ahead. This may only be possible in small measures and with short markers, such as three or six months ahead, but it’s an important time to step right back from the operational tasks that have taken up so much of our time, attention and energy and think – where is my leverage now?
If we don’t structure this in as a key part of our working week, we will simply stand still and it will be impossible to achieve new business outcomes.
There are still plenty of uncertainties and concerns out there, that’s true. However, the concerns are taking on a different shape . These are now, with the successful roll out of the vaccination programme, less centred around the threat to our health and the subsequent threat to our families and friends, jobs and businesses, and infrastructures and communities, and rather more focused towards the economic threat after the pandemic. The latter financial fallout from lockdown is certainly a crisis but we are able to move forward with increased business confidence because this is a crisis we know and have dealt with before. Few of us will be familiar with the problems created by a global medical emergency caused by a virus we’re still trying to understand, but many of us will have
worked through and brought our businesses out of recession.
Now, it’s a case of looking at how your business can diversify to capitalise on and reap a share of new opportunities. If you look outside of your business and you look to open up the conversation, you should find those opportunities.