With uncertainty in the air, wouldn’t it be nice if we had a crystal ball to gaze into and know what the future holds for businesses?

 Keryn Jarvis, Business Advisory Services Associate, at Baker Tilly Staples Rodway attempts to see into the future and provides some helpful hints for business owners planning for the new year.

Looking back a year ago to December 2020, as a country we were very complacent compared to the rest of the world on how we had survived the pandemic.

We had gone hard and fast with our first lockdown and life had returned to pretty much normal within our communities.

Now, here we are a year later, and it’s been a more difficult year for some regions and industries; businesses are starting to see the impact on product shortages and delays, and there is a lot more uncertainty in the community on what our summer may look like.

We have a ‘new normal’ with masks and scanning in wherever we go, and now our language includes things such as ‘vaccine passes’ and ‘traffic light systems’.

One thing that has emerged from the challenging times that COVID-19 has brought is that businesses have had to work harder, think smarter and be nimble to survive.

While we don’t have a crystal ball that can tell us what 2022 might hold, in times of uncertainty, a good place to start is to understand your future cashflow position under a range of different scenarios.

Scenario planning for different environments you might face can give you confidence as a business owner that you can survive the worst case, or it can help provide you with steps you need to do now to weather the storm if it is to hit. It will enable you to make better decisions, communicate impacts on your business to stakeholders and work out what levers could be pulled to get you through.

Business planning in a pandemic environment needs to be slightly different to traditional business planning and you need to not only look at the pandemic period but look to what happens after.

 Questions you might like to ask yourself are:

• What are the risks to my business and how should I position my business to recover and succeed in the new normal?
• Will people’s behaviours look different once the pandemic is over? Thinking about what behaviours have changed due to the pandemic and whether this could affect your business long term, can help you prepare for a long-term behavioural shift.
• Are there opportunities that can come from this environment for my business?
• Are there processes or systems within my business that can be made more efficient or be outsourced?

Thinking ahead in such an unknown environment can be tough but having a plan in place, improving what you can and knowing how different scenarios could impact your business, can help you get through the tough times and give you confidence in the decisions that you need to make.

Your business advisor can help you understand what these scenarios could look like for your business, so if you are unsure where to start your planning, I suggest making a call to them.

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