At the risk of stating the obvious, running a small/medium-sized business is no walk in the park. There’s a maze of challenges and seemingly millions of tasks to complete. That’s at the same time as working to carve out your niche and staying true to your purpose and values.
With all the complexity involved, it’s little wonder that many business owners—quite possibly most—turn to external sources of advice at some point in the development of their business. This often leads to disappointment because the conventional approach to business advice, because of its “siloed” nature, can fall well short of expectations. Have a read of our last post for our thoughts on this.
There’s a better way
There’s a more effective way to access business advice: through an integrated approach that brings together different aspects of your business into a cohesive “one-strategy” plan that makes sense for YOUR business. Rather than advisers working to different agendas, what you need as an owner is those advisers working toward the same objective — working to help you execute your strategy…not their interpretation of your strategy.
In other words, integrated business advice.
Stay with us…you’ll see what we mean.
At the heart of this integration is the convergence of your business advisers to create a seamless set of recommended actions tailored specifically to the needs of your business. Realistically, that should happen in all cases, but it rarely does. As we mentioned, most advice today is delivered in a siloed way, resulting in recommendations across disciplines that may conflict or simply lack coherence. On the other hand, integrated advice helps ensure harmony with your overarching strategy. The result is the “one-strategy” approach we’ve referred to a number of times.
Integrated advice is “on-purpose” advice
One significant advantage of integrated advice is that it means you can more readily remain true to your business purpose – the reason your business exists beyond making money. If you’d like to explore the concept of business purpose more fully, head over to the website of one of our founding members: GrowthCatalyst.
Integrated advice also offers SMEs a strategic advantage as it enables them to leverage the resources at their disposal more effectively. That’s because the processes behind integrated advice (certainly in the case of that delivered by Konektis) ensure that no business function is treated in isolation. Rather, there’s an appreciation that your business is a complex system. In that system, treating one component invariably impacts one or more others.
For example, a great employee engagement program shouldn’t be a standalone exercise. Instead, it should be crafted to align with your overall business strategy and objectives. Likewise, technology enhancements ought not be pursued simply for the sake of innovation or creating an “edgy” persona. Again, technology should be put to work strategically and ultimately to create an excellent and effective client experience.
It also facilitates innovation and business resilience
Business advice that’s genuinely integrated also creates a foundation for cooperative innovation in your business. The “one-strategy” approach is of enormous benefit in reducing some of the traditional cross-discipline barriers that tend to get in the way of cross-functional collaboration. It encourages a more cooperative business culture and underpins change management that might be required to achieve some of the more challenging objectives the business has set.
Many business owners have turned their attention to the issue of resilience and sustainability of business growth over time (in other words, growth that’s relatively consistent, reasonably predictable and repeatable). Blame Covid, but there’s no doubt that the turbulent economic and geopolitical environment is also contributing.
Ensuring that whatever external advice businesses are engaging is truly integrated helps create the capabilities that lay the foundation for sustainable business growth. It’s a great way to “future-proof” your business.
It’s not just a fad
Integrated business advice might seem like yet another piece of “buzzy” business management-speak. But the reality is far from that. If you’ve ever taken advice in your business from multiple sources, you’ll fully appreciate what we mean. While you might receive good stand-alone advice from each provider, when you try to piece it all together in the context of your business strategy and objectives, it’s highly likely that it just doesn’t work as well as you might have hoped.
Being a successful and resilient business isn’t likely to get any easier any time soon, and external advice of a specialised nature will only become more valuable. Before committing yourself to taking that advice, why not dive a little deeper into the benefits of ensuring that advice is truly integrated?