Top 10 Business Must-Dos To Thrive In 2024

Recent years have brought no shortage of volatility for businesses across all industries and of all sizes, and with the landscape continuing to shift in major ways as we enter 2024, business success demands rethinking, too.

Industry analysts predict that economic turbulence, geopolitical tensions, and climate events will mean 2023 hands off uncertainty into the new year. Yet for savvy leaders, strategic opportunities await for businesses positioning themselves resiliently.

By focusing on key areas - from resilience to sustainability - you can empower your organisation to not only survive but thrive in the year ahead.

Here are the top 10 business must-dos to thrive in 2024. These are essential areas to focus leadership time, investment, and strategic energies:

1. Build Business Resilience

With unpredictable demand and supply issues likely to persist, ensure your operations can smoothly scale capacity up or down to match needs in real-time. Only 34% of UK SMBs currently have this kind of flexibility ingrained.

Invest in demand forecasting technology, automate production and scheduling, hold stock buffers, and develop e-commerce channels. These tools will help improve responsiveness to market variables by better predicting customer requirements, optimising workflows to meet them, and accessing capacity buffers or alternate fulfilment pathways when the unexpected happens.

The Opportunity: Businesses with resilient operations can rapidly adapt to capitalise on market fluctuations through agile delivery, rather than losing out. Embracing automation and utilising predictive analytics tools will allow you to translate your valuable business data into actionable strategic insights.

The Risk: Without ingraining responsive plans and processes, you risk falling behind nimbler competitors who will be better able to adapt. Inflexibility will cripple your ability to meet customer requirements amid changing market forces.

2. Stress Test Financial Assumptions

With economic turbulence forecasted, regularly validate your budget assumptions of projected sales volumes, cost prices, and financing rates. Explore contingency plans you can execute if anything shifts significantly from expectations. 

Audit cash flow models against low/mid/high demand scenarios. Check breakeven thresholds if inflation, rising interest rates, or crucial supplier costs continue to rise. Identify non-essential costs to cut, plus financing options that will ensure sufficient buffers for operating expenses, if periods of challenge arise.

The Opportunity: Stress testing budget assumptions creates contingency plans enabling proactive responses, and minimising profit and continuity impacts when market conditions inevitably swing.

The Risk: Without scenario planning, sudden demand drops or cost spikes can catch businesses off guard, forcing reactive decisions that could themselves be damaging. Failure to validate assumptions in your plans risks nasty financial surprises.

3. Enhance Digital Capabilities

Almost half of UK SMBs acknowledge lacking the digital skills vital for competitiveness as technology continues to reshape business landscapes. From cloud systems to data analytics to social media, it's important to objectively assess your team’s readiness to adopt these types of tech capabilities, which are projected to enable over 80% of business growth opportunities ahead. 

Prioritise skills development in areas like customer analytics for customer segmentation insights, digital marketing for market visibility and lead generation, online sales processes supporting multi-channel revenue, cybersecurity protecting critical data, and automation to drive efficiency.

The Opportunity: Closing digital talent gaps builds operational efficiency, informs better decisions through data insights, and opens markets through digital channels, enabling your business to sustainably scale.

The Risk: Without proactively broadening digital literacy, you risk compromising productivity, poor data utilisation, missed sales opportunities, and becoming vulnerable to cyber attacks - all hampering competitiveness and business continuity.

4. Commit to Eco-Conscious Practices

Did you know that 50% of consumers rank sustainability as more important since the pandemic? Whether installing solar panels, enabling recycling streams, optimising supply chains or purchasing carbon offsets, it's even more important today to be highlighting your environmental and social responsibility improvements.

Stand out from competitors by quantifying and showcasing the impact of your environmental, social, and governance (ESG) efforts – be that materials conserved, emissions avoided, or communities supported. Communicate your commitment through your website, product information, and thought leadership content. 

The Opportunity: Proactive ESG initiatives improve reputation with customers and employees who are increasingly assessing brands based on their values, more than their financials. Sustainable changes often also drive many operational efficiencies too.

The Risk: Lagging behind customer and regulatory expectations on eco-conscious practices brings market exclusion risks, as public sentiment and government policy continue shifting to favour greener business models. 

5. Treat Employees as a Strategic Asset

With employee retention vital, focus on elevating worker satisfaction with initiatives such as wellness benefits, flexible work options, upskilling programs, and developing a positive culture that nourishes talent.

Build resilience against stress and uncertainty by focusing on positive psychology techniques, work-life balance, and supportive management. Create feedback forums and surveys to understand and respond to your team's needs. Invest in skills growth, constructive feedback cycles, and succession planning.

The Opportunity: Proactive development programs will help to reduce staff turnover as well as improve productivity. Creating empowered, engaged teams will drive creativity, loyalty, and positive customer experiences, which ultimately leads to business growth.

The Risk: Lagging staff engagement and inadequate talent inevitably lead to higher staff churn that will not only impact service levels, but is also demanding on leadership bandwidth to refill roles.

6. Explore Shared Services Partnerships

Look into creative ways of leveraging partnerships, consultancies, and managed services to add new capabilities or supplement existing functions in your business. Accessing dedicated expertise and the economies of scale these alternatives offer can deliver vital cost efficiencies and risk mitigation.

Assess whether full-time internal hires truly make sense across all support functions or if hybrid models mixing internal teams with external resources on specific activities may better serve growth objectives. 

The Opportunity: Pooling resources on administrative or operational activities frees up leadership time, mindshare, and funding to more fully steer growth in your differentiated domain.

The Risk: Overextending your current team distracts from core business focus and maxes out operational bandwidth, risking failures across multiple fronts.

7. Establish Customer Advisory Panels

As market dynamics keep evolving, actively seek insights from a diverse sample of customers on frustrations, needs, and preferences through brief surveys or informal advisory groups. Feed findings into innovation for products, services, and customer experiences.

Feedback from customers gives valuable reality checks, ensuring offerings and messaging align with buyer expectations rather than internal assumptions.

The Opportunity: Direct customer conversations provide vital grounding, ensuring innovation efforts resonate with actual evolving requirements, rather than perceived needs. 

The Risk: Insular planning can easily lose touch with shifting buyer expectations, issues,, and preferences, quickly making offerings misaligned.

8. Invest in Leadership Development

Building broader leadership capabilities across your team and developing skills embracing emotional intelligence, change management and strategic thinking will help to balance short-term execution with longer-term direction and development

Rotational job swaps, coaching, training, and mentoring relationships enhance personal development in all roles, whether looking to excel in current positions or preparing for future progression. Assess leadership potential to ensure succession planning and allocate dedicated hours for development.

The Opportunity: Enhanced leadership skills across the team improve abilities to handle uncertainty, complexity, and stakeholder demands through periods of rapid growth and transition. 

The Risk: Leadership deficits or narrow capabilities risk poor decisions under pressure, resistance to change initiatives and communication breakdowns, disengaging talent, customers, and partners.

9. Develop Future Planning Strength 

Start building organisational skills and processes to recognise signals about emerging technology shifts, buyer needs, competitor offerings, and market forces that may impact operations, in the short, medium, and long term.

Leverage trend analysis data and expert research that address societal changes, geo-political dynamics, and innovations on the horizon to help signal what is coming next. Convert this intelligence into potential scenarios to opportunity-proof and future-proof your strategies. 

The Opportunity: Getting ahead of developments allows you to place bets in emerging growth spaces while adjusting existing operations and plans ahead of any impending challenges.

The Risk: Failing to scan what's on the horizon leaves you vulnerable to being caught out by market disruptions that could negatively impact your business success.

10. Access On-Demand Strategy Support 

Supplement internal planning cycles and capabilities with specialised growth strategy advisors offering expert, tailored guidance. Benefit from an outside-in perspective to help pressure test existing plans and enhance decision-making.

The Opportunity: Expert insights inject vital impartial thinking and technical knowledge into planning processes, raising the likelihood of resilience and growth in the face of economic uncertainty.

The Risk: Insular planning teams often see things through one lens, missing important signals. This creates blind spots and can limit expansion roadmaps or new initiatives.

The most resilient businesses balance consistent execution with proactive steps to achieve sustained success. Use the new year as a catalyst for laying your new foundations and whatever challenges and opportunities 2024 delivers!

Need support addressing these key focus areas?

Our leadership development, strategy consulting, and strengths development services empower forward-looking businesses to build organisational capabilities and maximise emerging opportunities even amid uncertainty. Let's connect to explore how we can become a planning partner tailored to your growth goals. Book a call today!

Only 34% of UK SMBs currently have flexibility ingrained - source: McKinsey Global Small Business Survey from August 2021

Tools like demand forecasting technology, inventory buffers, etc boost responsiveness - Source: Supply Chain Insights Global Summit 2022 presentation

Almost half of UK SMBs acknowledge lacking vital digital skills - Source: Lloyds Bank 2021 Business Digital Index report

Technology projected to enable over 80% of growth opportunities ahead - Source: Dell 2022 Digital Transformation Index

50% of consumers rank sustainability as more important after recent societal shocks - Source: IBM Institute for Business Value research brief from 2021 survey data

70% of SMBs say leadership capability gaps undermine growth - Source: 2022 SME Recovery Report from Aston Business School

Over 50% of businesses say they have minimal capabilities predicting major industry shifts - Source: Gartner survey featured in Smarter With Gartner IT Symposium 2021