June 29, 2020

By Robert S. Graham
Chief Executive Officer
ROI Global Partners, LLC

In this century, it is imperative that businesses continue to change with the times. We have all read stories about companies that refused to change their business model with new technology. Blockbuster, Kodak, Blackberry, MySpace, Nokia, Sears, JC Penny, Motorola are among the countless companies who ignored the changing landscape and did not find their way into the digital and data revolution. While change can make businesses wary and want to hold onto the familiar ways of doing business. Sometimes the familiarity it was drives the company into a slow and sluggish model with little to no innovation or agility to change.  Change or transforming a company’s business model has many advantages when it comes to doing business and remaining relevant to the market it serves.

Why Change is Important in Business

1. Change Teaches Adaptability

While people and businesses can plan the day, month, or even year, nobody really knows what will happen that may fundamentally change how a business operates from day-to-day. If businesses don’t allow for flexibility and adaptability, then they don’t learn, they don’t try new things, and they can’t pivot to embrace the changes to allow for growth or survival.

2. Change Reveals Hidden Strengths

While change can reveal weaknesses within the company and in employees, it can also bring out strengths that the business or employees did not know they had or weren’t paying attention to. When changes spotlight previously ignored strengths, those strengths can then be developed and allow opportunities for more growth.

3. Change Breaks Routines

Routines are good, but they can create ruts that are hard, or impossible, to get out of. At times, older or familiar routines cast a paralyzing shadow which makes it difficult to find innovation or innovative was to push into a new market or strength the company’s current market position.

While routines are beneficial, they can become detrimental if a business is unable to break from routine operations and go in a different direction. There is no logic in sticking with a routine that will not work in the long-term.

4. Change Provides Opportunities

Change provides a multitude of opportunities that ordinarily would not happen if a business stays within the same routines and does not look for ways to create efficiencies or find ways to optimize the business or the customer experiences. Some examples would include AI, analytics, and sales automation. For example, some types of AI can use data to detect potential fraud, streamline customer acquisition and automate time-consuming sales and marketing tasks that take up time that can be directed elsewhere. Finding business intelligence opens considerable potential for growth and or profitability.

5. Change Develops A Workforce

When changes occur in a business, those who work in the business must adapt by developing skills they already have, as well as taking on responsibilities and learning new skills. Learning new skills and having new people take up positions of authority brings innovation, new ideas, and provides businesses opportunities to either go in a different direction or adapt to new technologies.

How Technology Can Transform Your Business

1. Lowers Costs

Businesses can use data and analytics to reduce marketing costs and find their customer base faster. Streamlining the customer journey and customizing their experience will lift market share and loyalty. Further, today’s technology allows employees to easily work remotely from home or anywhere. Simply understood, working from home reduces costs related to having more people in the physical business space, limits redundant systems, flexibility with phones, lower utilities, and much more. Further, the smart adoption of new technologies that align well with your business, such as AI and other intelligent tools with also greatly reduce overhead.  For example,   Gartner predicts that cloud-based AI use will increase five-fold from 2019 to reduce overhead and other costs with a serverless programming model.

2. Enhances Productivity and Efficiency Through Automation

The amount of data today’s organizations has to sift through to learn who is responding to marketing, sales revenue origination, compliance, forecasting and how well the business is doing overall are already highly complex.  Not using the data and analytical information will or could retard the growth of your business.  However, understanding the practical application of smart tools with help the sifting and recommend smart protocols aligned with your strategic business plan.  Gartner gives us another example and reports that by 2023, AI-augmented automation will be used by 40% of I&O teams, giving them a distinct advantage in the areas of IT productivity, scalability, and adaptability.

3. Focuses Growth

Technology can also be used to focus the growth within businesses. Business logic helps those in the business see areas for improvements. What is the most logical way for you to run your business?  Where do you find easily duplicable business logic for scale and profitable growth? Do you really know the key areas to focus on for real growth? Change can help open perspective and illustrate clear objects or methods for scalable growth.  One example, which may be the result of an outside professional such as our advisory team giving sharing smart tools and systems, may help your business reduce marketing costs and find customers faster. Speed to customers, improves the potential for a shorten revenue cycle.  With the shortened revenue cycle, due to automation helping to focus the direction of business by reducing employee errors, will increase revenue. With smart automation, your business can also reduce the number of employees or shift them to areas for output growth.

This McKinsey Digital article about quantum computers having the potential to resolve complex problems in the pharmaceutical industry, but that potential can be applied to any number of business industries for their data, analytics, IT needs and much more. Something that would take employees months of work to compile would only take a few hours to complete and then send to someone to interpret. This would enable businesses to grow far faster and allow them to see areas of growth that would have otherwise be overlooked.

Technology combined with best practices that are already established in the business world, such as collaboration, AI, business intelligence, and flexibility, often provides a bright spotlight on how to best move the business forward with what is available to them.

Ignoring technology that may provide the opportunities for growth, efficiency, and productivity you may be looking for, will make it harder and harder to be competitive in the marketplace.

Leaving room for technological experimentation in the business allows for faster adaptability in today’s world.