When it comes to improving productivity and innovating, collaboration is an essential ingredient. Sharing information and ideas between your team, customers, suppliers, competitors and others in your networks, allows you to more quickly find opportunities to improve as well as test and gather important feedback about what matters and how well it works.
In order for collaboration to occur, you need to engage people by sharing your vision with them and addressing their vested interest in participating and the value to them in doing so.
Once you have them on board make sure you have a strong commitment to enable your business to capitalise on the opportunities that arise.
The plethora of online communication and collaboration tools, the rise of smartphones and tablets and the continuing rise of cloud applications is making technology one of the greatest resources you have available to you and, in many cases, it’s free or low cost to access it.
The smart use of technology will continue to be one of the keys to business success. Harnessing technology and technological developments also helps you to also spot the trends in your business.
Developments in accounting and financial management software solutions alone over the last few years have delivered powerful real-time access to information about your business delivered to your desktop and mobile devices, allowing decisions to be made and action taken early enough to have a real positive impact on your bottom line.
Cash remains the life-blood of every business. Knowing the actual cashflow of your business will help to see you through the next six months and anticipate any trends that may repeat and need forward planning for.
If you haven’t already put a funding plan in place, make it part of your planning to ensure you have the cash that you need, when you’ll need it, to make sure the rest of this financial year is a financially viable one.
Marc Peskett is a partner of MPR Group a Melbourne based firm that specialises in providing business advisory, tax, outsourced accounting and grants and funding services, to fast growing technology and innovation businesses.
You can follow Marc on Twitter @mpeskett
