For many SME businesses, the next stages of the pandemic and global recession provide a gloomy outlook. However, beyond the dark clouds is a window of opportunity but it will only be seized by business owners liberating their employees to be creative, innovative, find new opportunities and change processes which adapt to the new world. Above all, a culture needs to be created where every employee feels they have an equal part to play.

Nick Gold, MD of Speakers Corner, will discuss why business owners need to create an entrepreneurial culture where every member of staff is working to drive the business forwards. It’s time to leave the old way behind and embrace this new world.

‘Purpose’. It started with the millennials first highlighting it and it was driven forward by Gen Z, but 2020 has been the year where society as a whole has taken it on. Purpose is everywhere. Individuals are re-evaluating their life choices and ambitions, framing them around purpose and real change. Business leadership teams have woken up to a cultural and societal shift that vacuous words or glossy marketing campaigns are not worth the investment unless they are backed by action. This is driven by both customers demanding more from their association with a brand to the employees who work for the company who want to be part of something that has the same ethos and values as the individual or to what the individual aspires to achieve.

For SME businesses, especially those where the business owner is still active within the business, a pandemic and global recession should be seen as an opportunity. Businesses are dreamed about and implemented based on passion and purpose, with the first employees recruited because they believe in the aims of the business or the values it aspires to live and grow by. The challenge for a business owner is to keep that early entrepreneurial fire burning in both the business and people working within it grow.  

The opportunity is to re-position the entrepreneurial spirit as the purpose that we are all looking for in our lives. By this being ingrained in the business and protected as sacred throughout the life of the company, the values that are driven from the top and the practices that are spawned from it should ensure that any business is protecting itself from the wider landscape and the business turmoil that it will bring.

Employees in any SME business will feel ownership of the business and its processes, and good leaders will lead and manage not through directives, but through a shared drive. Challenges will be solved through consensus with an understanding that these are uncharted times and no single person has a right or wrong idea. These ideas are not based on historical precedent or experiences but rather on creative, innovative thoughts which embrace the change that is taking place around us. SME businesses must foster courage and conviction that no idea should or can be discarded just because it hasn’t been done before or because it hasn’t worked in the past. These are the times when that embryonic idea, that undefined thought is going to be the solutions to problems that haven’t yet even been fully understood.

We now exist where the enthusiasm of a new idea is no longer measured against risk. Employees will recognise that new thoughts and creative ideas can no longer be challenged or rejected with any degree of confidence by a leadership team who are learning in this new world.  

For business owners and entrepreneurs, the biggest challenge is creating and maintaining a working culture where the employees are entrusted to work with new freedoms and controls because they have placed the values by which the business operates as their purpose. Those who get this right in the virtual world we now live in will see their business flourish because their team are as committed to its success as you are.