Creating an Agile Company: How to Predict, Prepare, and Roll with Market Change

Apex Insights

The business world is rife with change– and the businesses that succeed are the ones that roll with it, not fight it. So while you have a great idea or a company thriving now, it’s only natural to assume that how you fit into the market in three, five, or ten years will significantly differ from how you create success now.

And while no one has a crystal ball to perfectly nail preparations for the future, there are many tried and true methods to create the kind of organization that will thrive with change.

So we’ll highlight some patterns for reading the signs, implementing the right solutions, and continuing to evolve with market trends.

Predicting Market Change

Here are some top tips for building an environment to prime you to notice change early enough to align your business with those changes.

Note: while it’s essential to roll with change, obsessing over what the future may bring can significantly damage your business in the present. Never lean on one method too much, and don’t let monitoring them take over your ability to stay present.

Human Nature Never Changes

While what we sell changes over time, human nature rarely changes significantly. So building a product that answers constant human needs like time-saving, money-saving, or effort-saving will keep a solid foundation for your product or service.

Big Hits that Fizzled Out

Whenever something hits a fad and burns out quickly, it’s not because it was a terrible idea. It’s usually because they didn’t have enough time to adapt their product towards real needs before their inertia ran out. Vine versus Tiktok is a great case study for optimizing a flash fad for lasting success.

Keep a Pulse on “the People”

Trends, social media, and chat forums are essential sources of raw information about what people hope from future products and services. Conduct formal, statistically relevant searches– but also take a regular dip into places like Redditt and see what’s going on.

Creating an Agile Company Infrastructure

Accurately reading the signs will do you little good if your company’s structure is inflexible or slow to change. There are plenty of things to do now that will increase your business profitability today and prime you for the correct change in future markets.

Empowering Company Culture

One of the first planks of a flexible company is empowering employees from the ground up. While a clear chain of command is essential to good work and anti-anarchy, it can’t be about maintaining egos with titles. Help each employee to excel at their job, make as many decisions as possible, and to have plenty of opportunities to provide feedback about what’s working and what isn’t.

Growth-Mindset Opportunities

Companies that grow and adapt well make a growth-mindset more than a tagline by providing time and sponsoring continued education. Whether it’s a two-day seminar, an online course, or in-house training materials, a company culture focused on learning will be better prepared for market changes.

Plan to Enact Changes Regularly

If you have habits of looking and a foundation that is ready for change, it’s time to consider what your plan for change is. How will you proactively plan for changes?

Build in Regular Review Time

One strategy to proactively prepare for changes is to set aside regular time to review your current business, new and successful competitors, and market trends. Each industry will have different arches to change, with tech evolving more quickly than other fields. So we recommend setting aside time between quarterly and annual reviews.

Create Predetermined Thresholds for Change

While regularly scheduled reviews will build change into your schedule, not all significant market changes happen gradually. The pandemic is an excellent example of how the entire world changed overnight. Performance metrics often guide the long-term trends of your business, but will also signal when something has changed drastically in a short amount of time. Have clear thresholds that signal when performance metrics have dipped too low and require immediate attention.

Ready for Growth?

Managing business growth is challenging, especially when you already feel strapped on time and resources. So how do you know which changes will bring the greatest ROI and how many new things to balance at once? That’s where we come in.

Think of us as a third-party partner committed to supporting you from start to finish. That includes discovery, implementing changes, and sticking around to see your business recover. And we’ll still be there in a year or two to help you adapt to new needs and growth!

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