Strategic Reprioritization:

What businesses did to continue building long-term value while on the rollercoaster caused by the last three years of volatile change…

Check out this article by EY where they researched more than 3,000 strategic growth plans created by privately owned entrepreneurial businesses around the world to show how business strategic priorities have changed since 2019. Their research shows that these changes have taken place in four distinct phases.

1. Growth acceleration
2. Recovery from crisis
3. Crisis management and business continuity
4. War for talent

Growth Acceleration:

1. Customer: Entrepreneurial businesses sought to enhance the experience across the full customer journey with their business. This involved a strong focus on product and service innovation.
2. Technology: By adopting new technologies (such as artificial intelligence) and improving their data and analytics capabilities, entrepreneurial businesses aimed to enhance the digital customer experience to meet changing customer demands.
3. People: To implement technological changes and achieve digital transformation, entrepreneurial businesses needed to build new internal skillsets and competencies. This led them to focus on recruitment, upskilling the workforce and developing the leadership team itself.

Recovery from crisis:

1. People: Entrepreneurial businesses prioritized the health and wellbeing of their people and workforce.
2. Customer: As businesses faced a sudden drop in demand, they emphasized customer retention and loyalty, as well as brand protection.
3. Finance: To secure continuity, businesses immediately focused on liquidity and cash flow management. Where possible, and where necessary, this included making use of government grants and incentive schemes.

Crisis management and business continuity:

1. Customer: Businesses redesigned their ”customer journeys”, often moving to digital channels. They optimized all touchpoints on these journeys while seeking to manage the holistic customer experience. Additionally, they invested in product and service innovation to meet new customer demands and embarked on innovative partnerships, strategic alliances or M&A deals to quickly respond to changing customer needs.
2. Technology: Many of the changes on customer journeys needed to be technology-enabled, leading businesses to adopt new technologies and data analytics capabilities.
3. People: Demand for digital competencies and skill sets led to a shortage of talent. Besides an increased focus on recruitment, this caused a strong focus on upskilling the workforce to build up new skillsets and competencies.

War for talent:

1. People: Businesses want to manage their talent shortages and retention rates. They are therefore focused on recruitment and employer branding, strategic workforce planning, talent development programs, total reward packages and critical succession planning.
2. Operations: The pressure on margins is leading businesses to prioritize cost-saving programs. These programs aim to reduce the cost of goods sold and the cost of capital, increase efficiency and productivity levels, improve supply chain management, boost working capital, digitalize processes, enhance forecasting, and review pricing strategies.
3. Technology: Technology adoption is helping to drive down costs by further automating and digitalizing work processes while improving customer engagement and journeys. Businesses are making ongoing investments in data analytics capabilities and cyber security.

Factors for Success:

1. Building resilience
2. Scenario planning
3. Balancing capabilities across seven key drivers of growth – people, technology, operations, customer, finance, transactions, risk

 

Read the full article here:  Strategic Reprioritization Article