Episode 446: 5 ways to future proof your business in a hard economy
In this episode, Fiona dives into the essentials of future-proofing your business. She highlights five critical areas to focus on, ensuring long-term business sustainability and success. Tune in!
You'll Learn How To:
Importance of using business downtime strategically
Environmental impact of online businesses and data storage
Long-term financial planning
Cash flow management
Enhancing current products
Strategic hiring and employee retention strategies
Building financial buffers for business stability
Identifying unchanging customer needs for future success
Adapting products and services for evolving markets
Incorporating technology in industries
Ensuring employee satisfaction and long-term growth
Ethical practices in global supply chains
Data protection and customer safety in modern businesses
Technology and its impact on businesses over the last 30 years
Embracing AI and tools for operational efficiency
Understanding customer needs through data analysis and trends
The balance between human skills and technology in business
Utilising social media for small business growth
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You want to keep on the front foot and think about the whole life cycle of your product, the service you're offering, and how can you make tweaks to take you from just running a good business that does status quo to running a great brand that people love and adore because you've thought about these things. That's number three in the five key areas to think about when future-proofing your business.
Welcome to episode 446 of the My Daily Business podcast. Today is a coaching episode and if you are maybe having a little bit of a downturn in your business right now or maybe just you have the time to think about what am I doing with this business and where am I taking it in the future. Then today it's absolutely a session for you. You can of course take notes. You can also always look at the transcript for all of our podcasts at mydailybusiness.com/podcast. Before we get stuck into this important coaching episode, I want to let that we are running, the Marketing for Your Small Business course and coaching program and it is a perfect time of year to do this because you can map out a strategic marketing plan for 2025 and if you're reading this later on, you can do this course anytime.
It's always available online, but twice a year we do offer a live coaching component so you can do the course and then show up for one hour of live coaching every week for nine weeks. At the end of it, you have the option to present your marketing plan to me and everyone else in the group for feedback. You can just head to marketingforyoursmallbusiness.com for all of the information or mydailybusiness.com/courses. The other thing of course I want to mention is to acknowledge that traditional owners and custodians of the beautiful lands on which I'm recording this, I work, I live, I play, I run these courses and right now there are incredibly crazy winds happening outside here in Melbourne. But for me, these lands are traditionally owned by the custodians, the Wurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation. I pay my respects to them and their elders past and present and acknowledge that sovereignty has never been ceded. Let's get into today's coaching episode.
I know that a lot of people are listening to this podcast from all over the world and a lot of small business owners are struggling at the moment I often say to different clients in all sorts of situations, I've been doing this for almost 10 years now, this business and before that worked for huge businesses and small businesses and all sorts and there are always going to be down times. And then you've got your peaks again. And in those downtimes when potentially the sales are not coming in as frequently as you might like them to come in or maybe certain opportunities have taken a backseat or people are postponing things because they're not making the income so they're not buying into whatever it is that you are selling your services or your products or your experiences.
In that time people usually do one of two things. One is they freeze and they freak out and just don't do anything or just put a stop to everything and pause and like, I don't want to spend any money. You don't have to always spend money, but you need to spend time and sometimes in those quieter periods you want to use the time that you have to start mapping out things. Whether that is a deeper marketing plan, as I said, we are running Marketing for Your Small Business, the live course and coaching program soon, just head to marketingforyoursmallbusiness.com, whether it is looking at succession planning for your people, for your staff, or maybe hiring your first staff member. And it's like, these systems need to be documented before somebody else comes into the business.
It could be all sorts of things, but what you don't want to do is freeze in this time because things are cyclical, it will come back, it will bounce back up and we will see people spending more than they have or are currently. What you don't want to do is freeze and have nothing to show for that time. I'm not saying hustle at all. What I'm saying is to use this time strategically. If let's say for example you are a shop that is usually quite busy and you've seen a bit of a downturn, it's like, now the shop is not going to close. We are going to keep things running and what are we going to improve that is already working well? Maybe an online store, these particular categories, they're converting well online, how could we replicate that across other categories or are there things or other things online that we're doing or any email sequences that we are not doing in-store?
Physically is there something that we need to change about the store experience? Looking at these things today I wanted to talk about it even one step further, which is thinking about the future of your business and looking at the things that you can do now to help give your business the best possible chance of success. To give you some context, I was born in the eighties and I grew up without the internet. A while ago, I think it was like 2018, my husband and I took our only son to New Zealand and we did the whole camper van thing and it was incredible. New Zealand is like, it's such a beautiful country. We went around in the camper van we were at one particular campsite and my husband was setting something up. I had gone on a walk with my son and I think it was about four or five at that stage and we walked all around and we were heading back to the campsite and we saw this thing that my son had never seen and he pointed it out and he was like, “Mama, what's that?”
He thought it was like a rocket, he didn't know what it was. I was like, “What do you think it is?” Turns out it was a phone, it was a public telephone. He had never seen one of those and I was explaining to him that when I was a kid we would take 20 cents and we would go to the public phone and we would do silly prank calls and just other things and that I was explaining to him if somebody wanted to call me, like anyone in my family could have answered it, granny or granddad could have answered it, my brothers could have answered it. We didn't have mobile phones, and we had this great conversation and since then my son has been almost 12. He often talks about the olden days, A.K.A, the nineties and some things have improved a huge amount, but there are lots of things and lots of businesses that you think if they had just thought about where the future was going and what was coming potentially they'd still be around.
Say for example Borders, the Bookshop magazine store. I used to spend so much time in the Carlton Borders store when I was growing up and going to uni and living around there and I would love it. I would sit on the floor, I would read the magazines, I would read the books, I would do all these things and I get e-commerce and everything else is largely to blame for that. But I still think that there are bookstores and magazine shops that have done incredibly well even in this post-internet environment. Today it's thinking about your business, with your industry, are there things you can do to future-proof it? Nothing is guaranteed, but there are five areas I think everyone should be focusing on, whether you are a solo operator or whether you're a larger business.
Without looking at these five things, chances are you are going to get a bit slammed by the future and you need to assess what we need to change now and what small steps can we start taking action on now that can potentially future-proof our business. The five areas that I think people need to focus on or five categories, growth areas, whatever you want to call them, environment, finance, product people, and technology. Let's start with the environment. I mean there's no denying the negative impact that we're all having on the planet. Everyone has a role to play, especially businesses that are making money by selling products or services that have a direct environmental impact. If you're sitting there thinking, well I am not a product-based business, so I just run an online business and that's not doing anything for the environment, it is massively harming, full harsh stuff to the environment.
Honestly, if you need to look at this, you can just look up Google data centre water usage, you could look up carbon emissions data storage centres. I mean you would see so many facts on this. Keep reading. If you're an online business, like my business is predominantly online, it's easy to think I'm not contributing to environmental issues. You massively are. I mean where do you think all of these digital files are stored? We have like in coaching, for example, we will often say to people, we can record this session for you. Now those recordings are about one gig. We will say to please download that to your server if you would like to keep it because we do delete them after a couple of months. We have had loads, I have these orange terabyte hard drives everywhere in my office, but I've had to start deleting things.
I remember a couple of years ago I had this wonderful client, and I said to him, “Do you want me to record the session?” He said no, because where do all those recordings sit? They sit in some massive storage facility in the desert in the US that is pushing out these horrible carbons and all of these toxins into the environment and we're not thinking about that as online businesses. That's a bit of a side note, but we all need to be thinking about what are we doing for the environment because people are quite rightly expecting more from the brands that they connect with. Whether that is your employees expecting more from your suppliers, your stockists, the customer or someone who just likes your content on social media.
They're going to be asking questions quite rightly and demanding that you have an environmental policy. You want to think the environmental policy is not just a choice or an option, it's a requirement. And I know in some countries they're, they're much more stringent on this. In other countries not so much. But it will become a thing like so many parts of life now that we just demand from the companies that we work with. We want to know what's your supply chain. What is this? How is it ethically made, and where is it made? What percentage has been made outside of the country? I live in all of those things. You want to think about how will your brand reduce its impact on the environment in years to come. You may not be there yet. I mean I know in our business I'm looking at this and there's loads that we could be doing better, but you want to think, where are we in the next two years?
Where are we in the next five years? Where are we in the next 10 years and what can you start doing now no matter how small that can be? And you think about compound and with compound effort, what can you do now that will then have a positive impact on the environment in the future? And so for product-based businesses, this may be reviewing your packaging, your production processes for the business as well as the afterlife of the product itself. What happens when people don't want to use it anymore? Can it have another use? Is it truly designed to last? Can it be recycled via your channels? Can it be reconfigured in some way? The other thing with this is you want to think about that as a product-based business. I wear glasses, I'm supposed to wear glasses, I should be wearing them a lot more than I do and I have three pairs of glasses, I have sunglasses that have a prescription in them, I have glasses that I'm supposed to wear if I'm just like watching TV.
Then I have glasses that I wear for reading and computer work. That's three pairs of glasses for one person. I get my glasses from a particular glasses shop. I've been going there before I started this business, I think they just came to Australia around then, so probably about 10 years now. Every year I used to go in and get my two pairs of glasses because I have private health insurance that would cover them and one year I said to them, can I recycle these? I've got so many pairs of glasses at home and if my lens like my prescription is changing a little bit because my eyes might be getting worse then like is there a place I can recycle these or could they be used or sent to countries where potentially people don't have access to as much eye health and glasses and things.
They said no, we have no recycling policy. And I was like, “Really?” And they pointed me to their biggest competitor and said, they're the only ones in Australia that recycle glasses so you might want to try there. And I was like, so you mean to tell me that you have millions of customers, you are encouraging them to get two pairs at least every single year. Let's say I've been wearing glasses since I was 17, I am now in my forties. That's a lot of glasses if I get two pairs of glasses, let alone sunglasses every year that I can't recycle or do anything with. That alone turned me off that brand and since then I have not been going back every year. The last time I went back was two or three years after the last set of glasses and it made me look at other brands.
You want to be thinking, especially if you're a product-based business, what happens with our staff? I know some businesses, I mean Patagonia have been leading this for years where if you no longer need it or it's broken or things have happened to it, you can take it back either to get fixed or it can be recycled and reused by the brand in some way. You want to be thinking what is the long-term life cycle of our products? Also with your products, can you go deeper and improve current product lines rather than coming up with new ones all the time? Can you go, these are our key products, what could we do to make this one even better? Because we've already got an audience for it, we've already done the marketing for it. What could we do to just improve this as opposed to let's create 10 more products or 200 new skews?
Thinking about that for service-based businesses, it could be looking at your circular waste management system as well as things as I said before, digital filing because, and I think this is something that a lot of people don't know and according to Greenly, data storage currently makes up 2% of global carbon emissions and accounts for more carbon emissions than the commercial airline industry. That is a fact that I had to check and look up everything for my new book business to branch. When I was recording the book for audio, which is coming out very soon, the producer who was great to work with, he like after we recorded that section, he was like, “Is that real?” And I was like, “Yes.” And he's like, “I had no idea.” Here we are, we're all like, when we buy a flight we're going to do this and that.
And yet you think about how many billions of us in the world and how so many of us have our photos I think I've got like 17,000 photos on my phone and if you've got kids, chances are you've got that much plus more or a dog or something. I mean we're constantly taking photos of everything and so where are they all being stored? They have to be stored somewhere and we're all paying for like Apple Cloud and Dropbox and Google Drive and it's like think about what that is doing to the environment. Thinking about how often you can as a brand, if you're a service-based brand or any brand, review your impact and think about what is in our systems that can reduce this. For example, with us, as I said, we used to store everything and now we try and say to clients, if you want to store it, you store it and we delete it.
But also every couple of months, every quarter I'm trying to go through and just like delete anything I don't need to delete documents that you download five times. Make sure that we not doubling up on things in different Google drives and dropboxes and all of that. What can you do and how can you make this part of your normal routine and how often are you looking at other less impactful ways to do business? For example, if you travel a lot within the same country or let's say you're in Europe and you're travelling or in the Americas, could you travel by train rather than a plane? Yes, it's going to add some stuff to your time, but could that happen to things like the food that you're stocking in your kitchen? Let's say you've got staff and you bring in, I know you get fruit delivered or other snacks and stuff.
Where is it coming from and could you potentially work with a local producer or a local farmer or something rather than shipping it in from the other side of the globe? Looking at these small things that potentially you can do and you can have an impact in your little part of the world. Because if we all do that, make goodness it adds up. Thinking about how are you auditing your business and your brand through an environmental lens. That's the first one. The second one is finance. When you're looking at future-proofing your business, finance is key because cash flow or the lack of cash flow is one of the most common reasons for businesses to close down. I've seen it so many times, you can have this incredibly purpose-led brand but without a positive cash flow and an intimate awareness of your finances, your business is just not going to be around that long to be able to make an impact.
It's why I called the first book Passion Purpose Profit because you can have passion and purpose but without a profit, no one's going to see the impact or influence of that passion or that purpose because you're not long you can't stick around because you can't pay yourself or you can't pay your staff or you can't pay your bills just to keep afloat. When it comes to future thinking, you want to look at your finances because future thinking around them and understanding how it all works is crucial for long-term success. Too often, and I again unfortunately see this a lot, business owners will only look at their finances with any scrutiny when there's nothing they can actively do to change it. For example, retrospective, it's looking at things at tax time or when a payment has bounced or when a significant purchase needs to be made and you don't have the capital to do so.
Future thinking is about ensuring you have adequate financial systems in place to balance the financial needs of the business as it stands today with what you think it'll look like tomorrow. For example, if you are considering the overall vision for your brand, who else will you need to employ to create that vision and bring it to life in the next three to five years? Who else needs to be brought on? And then things like, your premises need to be updated. Do you need to hire a studio? Do you need to have commercial rent? Do you need to overhaul all your equipment, your warehousing, and your warehousing system? Maybe you are going to expand, so where is that money going to come from? Also the tech platforms and tools that you might need to invest in. If you are thinking, I need to be doing more video content or is it building a mini studio?
Is it creating a podcasting space? I mean what does that all look like and where is the money for all of this going to come from? How will you fund your future? That is an important thing to look at. Another element to consider when you're looking at the future, like financially for your brand are things like inflation and obviously, we are all experiencing that right now and also things like global economic changes that may pose a risk for some of your product selection or your pricing strategy and even who you are hiring in your retention of staff. How are you staying up to date with these elements and how are you future-proofing all of this? Thinking about it and thinking about it on the regular like every quarter sitting down and running these numbers and looking at all of it to ward off potential stress and financial pressure for you now but also in the years to come.
It's like when you get all your insurances sorted and you're like okay so we are good I feel like we've got a bit of a safety net here or I often talk to clients about having a buffer having like a three to six-month buffer. Yes, if things get difficult you have enough to know that you can tide yourself over. I mean at the absolute minimum, knowing your survival rate is key for business success knowing that, things might be down right now, however, we know our survival rate and we are hitting that so we are good like we can stay afloat. That's number two finance. The third thing to think about when you are looking to future-proof your business and taking the time to think about what success looks like in the next few years and how am I going to work on things now to ensure that is product.
Your product, and again I know sometimes I say product people just switch off like I don't have a product-based business but your product includes your service offerings, your physical products, anything that you're offering including any mix of products and services or experiences. What you want to consider is how much your product offerings have changed since you began the brand and also what changes you believe that people will want if any in the future. I mean it's often said how Jeff Bezos from Amazon hones in on what people will still want in the future, what won't change. I'm reading a good book, I'm listening to it on Audible about this exact thing I think it's called Same as Ever by Morgan Housel. And it goes to that point that Jeff Bezos is famous for talking about what won't change and he focuses Jeff Bezos so much on making sure that delivery people will always want things delivered quickly.
That's where they hone in and spend a lot of their money and resources to make sure I get Amazon's like much disliked by a lot of people and I understand why, but honing in on what won't change is important. Looking at your products and services and thinking, will people still need this? And particularly with things like AI and the rise of that, which parts of your business will people still need? I know for example with business coaching, people still need accountability. Yes you can put through all your questions into ChatGPT or Claude or any of them and it's going to spit out like here's what you should do or you can put your numbers in and no longer going to have to see a financial advisor. I'm not saying to do that, but yes they can tell you what to do but without you staying accountable to doing it, does anything change?
I mean I think business coaching in general, I often say to people it's like seeing a personal trainer. The personal trainer can give you a workout plan, and they can give you what food to eat, but you need to do the work for anything to change. Likewise, a whole bunch of AI can help but it can't do it for you in some cases. You want to think about all of this for your business, what will people still need and then also what will change for those needs in the future of your audience. And so with this like let's take for example the funeral industry. I think this is an industry that absolutely could be shaken up but it doesn't have to be as well because there'll be certain elements that just people expect and there have been funerals obviously since the dawn of time and so people will be very happy to go with the status quo and use these products in terms of the funeral industry that have been around for thousands of years in relation to their particular like cultural and religious beliefs.
But the brand experience may differ and that might be what sets you apart in terms of if your business was in the funeral industry from your competitors. Let's say like coming out of Covid, I mean I know we're still in it, but many people now expect that all funerals will be live-streamed. I know that I was watching the funeral of my uncle passed away earlier this year in Ireland and it was so lovely to be able to sit on my couch in the evening in Melbourne and livestream and hear from my cousins talking about their father and that was amazing. At one point they said, we know our cousins are over there in Melbourne watching like and like it's beautiful to be able to connect families like this. Whereas even seven years ago my mom flew to Ireland for a funeral because there was no such thing as live-streaming funerals.
That is just an expected thing that people in the funeral industry have had to catch up with. But also people may expect things like digital versions of the order of service or the pamphlets that come with it. A Spotify playlist of all the songs that were played at the funeral or a way to donate online instead of like to a charity or a cause rather than sending flowers. But if you were in the funeral industry and you were doing this exercise, you might stop and go, how could we make it even better? How could we make an even better product or service for our offers? And that might look like, and if you're a funeral industry person reading this, here's your plan, but it might look like things like tree planting or carbon offset as part of its packages.
It may also go one step further and work with like say a grief psychology practice to offer one-off or ongoing family grief counselling or even meditation or breath work activities for use within the first 12 months after a death. You could have an app that has all of this information in it, it may take the photos used in the service and create a book or a tangible memory of that person's life or it may even help the family in setting up an anniversary event 12 months after the death. You want to think about your products and services and what would make for an even better brand experience for your audience in the future. What are people hoping for today? I wish they had that, that tomorrow will just be an expectation. Things like I've just said with the funeral industry maybe people did think back in the day, it would've been nice if I necessarily didn't have to get on a plane to go to a funeral with family if I lived in another country, wouldn't it be incredible if they could live stream it?
That's just an expectation. You want to be thinking about how can be one step ahead and thinking about what people will just expect in years to come. Say, for example, the funeral that my mother went to shortly before she passed away in 2017 was one of my uncles in Ireland. And I'm sure at that time my mom was using Skype a lot to talk to her siblings in Ireland and it may never have crossed her mind and I don't know because she's passed away, I can't ask her these things, but I'm sure other people were like, there's Skype so why can't we Skype funerals as opposed to having to get on a plane. I mean of course you want to be there with your family if you can, but there's a huge cost involved, there's time involved, there may be people with elderly health issues or other health issues or challenges or children that they can't leave to get to a funeral.
People probably had that thought like Skype is around, why couldn't we put a computer in a church and live stream it and that was just a hope, but now it's an expectation say with my other uncle who passed away also in Ireland earlier this year. What's that seven years then it's just an expectation. You want to keep on the front foot and think about the whole life cycle of your product, the service you're offering and how can you make tweaks to take you from just running a good business that does status quo to running a great brand that people love and adore because you've thought about these things. That's number three in the five key areas to think about when future-proofing your business. We've gone through environment, finance and product. The fourth one is people, alright so people are crucial for any business success and when it comes to future thinking, you want to consider your current and potential employees and what they will expect from the business in years to come.
Often when we talk about people people just think about your actual audience or your customers, your clients, or your guests. But you also want to think about the people in the business. In 2022 the Australian Prime Minister, our current prime minister Anthony Albanese, passed a law that requires employers to grant 10 days of paid leave to anyone who needs to flee a family and domestic violence situation. And that was enacted in 2023 last year. If you're listening in real-time and in the same year the workplace gender equality amendment closed the gender pay Gap Bill 2023, what a long name was passed in parliament. This has led to companies with a hundred or more staff having to report gender pay disparities, which will then be published publicly. Now elements like this are quite rightly becoming expected by staff.
As I said before, when we're talking about products, there are hopes today that there will be expectations tomorrow and requirements tomorrow. You want to be thinking about how you will talk to the needs of your staff if you're lucky enough to have them now, or your potential staff that you are hoping to bring in with your internal policies and procedures and processes. What are you doing around things like harassment, corruption, bribery, bullying? I mean we constantly hear it. I don't know where you're reading this from, I know we've got people all over the world, which is amazing, but pretty much across the board, there is constant corruption. You constantly hear this at big corporations but this is happening all over. I mean humans are humans, right? There's always going to be people that are trying to, I know rt the system and so you want to be thinking how do we deal with that in our business?
How are we keeping up to date with things like again in Australia we just recently had a bill passed, gosh what is it called? It's like the right to switch off or something so you don't have to get back to your boss if your boss is contacting you after hours. Had this bill been around in many of the places that I've worked it was just expected. I had people messaging me at 5:00 AM, or 11 p.m. on a Sunday on a public holiday and it was just expected that you had to get back to them. Sometimes for sure you also enable people to treat you like that if you are getting back to them because you're training them, whether that's a boss or whether it's clients that you are like, we've got a policy that I don't work on these days and yet I'll get back to you on those days for sure and I've been guilty of that, but this new policy that's come into effect, it's like, what does that look like?
If you look at today's youngest working generation, there are amazing things that they are putting into place and being like, no, I don't want to just live to work. I don't want to be stressed out in my mind all the time. There are pros and cons and I'm not going to hear sit here as a 40-year-old going hmm in my day. But as a business owner, you want to be on top of this stuff and you want to think about likewise what are you doing to ensure you're hiring people that are not only committed to where you are taking the brand but also can grow with your brand in the future. When and how often are you reviewing your staff and looking at your succession planning? Thinking about how often I give feedback to the staff so they feel valued, and they feel seen, but they also know what to work on to succeed and grow with the company.
Also things like what is your policy around training and upskilling staff? I remember at my last job I walked in and I was looking at the budget and the money and the stuff and I said to my boss, is there a training budget? And didn't have like as in it wasn't necessarily my boss's issue, it was the issue of the entire massive company that we were one brand under this umbrella company because everything was held with HR and then HR had a small amount of money for executive training and like top top manager training. I remember I went to like this, three or $4,000 training for managers, which wasn't so great, to be honest, but like they had some for that executive role but they didn't have any for like juniors and it's like juniors are often the people that need the training the most.
I worked with my boss who was, who was quite encouraging of this and we put in place like a training budget, and we said to the staff, I said to everyone in the marketing team like hey if you've got a course or something you see out there, come to me because we may be able to find the money for it. I remember one particular person shouting out, that she was good on our social media, she was our social media person and she took board so much feedback, honestly, the feedback that I gave her at the start, she probably thought I was horrible but she took that on board and she grew with it. She asked questions, she showed initiative, and she found a course, I remember she found this Instagram marketing course, it was on a weekend and she was like, would the company pay for this?
I'm happy to go on a weekend. And I was like, totally. You want to think in your business are there things that you can put in place? I know in our business we have subscriptions to certain courses and other things that I've bought and shared with people that work with me. I've also bought courses for them to upskill in certain areas. You want to think about that, like what else are you helping with your staff? Yes they probably will upskill and at some point, they're going to leave your company and take that knowledge somewhere else, but you are also giving them that knowledge so they can do a better job while they're in your company as well. Also, that's the stuff that people like and enjoy and can see as a perk to staying with a company.
Also, thinking about professional development and financially forecasting it and managing it from a time perspective. If you are thinking, yep, okay we want this person to upskill in SEO or we're going to get them to, I mean we have people who put their staff through our Marketing for Your Small Business course and that's a chunk of time it's a big course and it also, with the course in coaching program it's nine weeks of coaching on a particular at least an hour live coaching and then at least a couple of hours to do the work as well. You want to also be managing it like how does that work on a time perspective and maybe you're putting those things in in the quieter periods of the year. Also future thinking about like people in this, because this is the people section thinking about how does this extend to your suppliers?
How are you going to continue to work with your suppliers and nurture great relationships and also ensure things that they're in adhering to human rights and labour standards and creating ethically sound products or also creating things in psychologically safe environments. How do they create psychologically safe spaces for their staff that's part of you if you are getting things made. I know it could be very hard with manufacturers to track everything even in huge companies when we had like whole teams devoted to this, but trying to do your best and also on that, how often are you connecting with your makers and creators and manufacturers in real life? I know it was very difficult during covid for people to do that, especially if you're creating things offshore. But again, where does that come into your financial planning? Where does it come into your time management?
How do you get over there? When are you getting over there? What things are you looking for? Are you looking at certifications and other such things? And also when it comes to considering the future for the people, you also want to think about global shifts that might mean a change in the way that you manufacture or operate your business as well as the causes that you support and the brands you collaborate with. There is a good book that I have been reading over the last year and I mean it hasn't taken a whole year but it's a good book but I feel like everyone should read it and it is called The Heart of a Cheetah, How we have Been Lied to about African poverty and what that means for Human Flourishing by McGee Wade. And that is looking at this idea of like global innovation and the issues that many businesses in the west have created in places like in some of the countries within Africa.
As the world becomes more global and we all start understanding a lot more the damage that the west particularly has done, done to a lot of places around the world and their populations through businesses. We also need to think about, how we take responsibility and understand a way forward that is not meaningful. I always think of Lauren Hill, I love Lauren Hill, she's like one of my favorite artists of all time. But she has a song and there's a line and in that line is something like why for you to increase I must decrease. And I think we in the West as business owners need to look at that. Are we profiting off slave labor? Are we profiting off unethical practices? And that is something that a lot of people don't want to confront and they don't want to look at it what they're doing.
That is part of the people looking at your future proofing and looking at it through the lens of people making sure that you're being real and you're being honest and maybe right now you're like, we would need to change this and change this and okay maybe it's a 12 to 24-month project. I'm not saying you're going to just fix everything overnight and it's an ongoing thing, but just becoming more aware, starting with education, starting with this book like The Heart of a Cheetah. Also think about your customers and clients like what are you putting in place or what will you need to put in place to ensure that their data remains protected and what are you going to make sure to do in the future or do now so that everyone feels welcome and safe within your organisation, within your stores, within your physical locations.
That is under people. Again, if you want to go through this in text format you can find the show notes for this at mydailybusiness.com/podcast/446. The last thing and obviously the thing that most people think of when they think about future-proofing their business is technology. As I said, I grew up in the eighties and nineties and I'm from that last generation that grew up without the internet. I think it launched in Australia, I mean properly launched so that where people could like have it in their homes. I remember we were one of the first in my friendship group to have it and that was at the very end of my final year of high school. In the late nineties and even when I was at university, I mean very few people used the internet when I was at university it was, you still used the library, I remember your fingers would like to have black ink all over them because you'd be photocopying so much stuff.
I sound so old, but I remember there was a couple of computers and there were people's AOL and Hotmail addresses and you could check them like every few days. It was like you didn't have enough to like it even every few days you might have like three emails in there. In the space of 30 years, we have embraced these change in technology that no one could have ever, ever predicted. When I was at university ,majored in sociology and thought that one day I'd become a professor in sociology. But as a major in sociology I read a lot of Dostoevsky and all of them and there is this one quote in the House of the Dead by Dostoevsky that I think sums up our relationship with technology and it says man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything.
I think that is the best definition of him. For you to be future thinking, you want to think about have I genuinely got an acceptance at even am I embracing technology in all of its advancements? Because you can't, you just simply can't embrace technology and what it's bringing and things like AI, I mean it's here, it's only going to get more skilled and sophisticated. How can I use this best in my business? I think embracing technology is about understanding your audience, understanding your vision as a business and what those two things your vision and your audiences will need in the future. You want to think about how can I use technology to better understand or even predict what customers and clients will want more of in the future. Things like Google Trends is a very simple way to look at this.
Even if you look at say the use of the word business coach and you look at that from a Google trend perspective and you see the years that it peaked, you see a lot of people saying they're a mentor now or a consultant. I used to call myself a consultant, my actual company is Fiona Killackey Consulting Proprietary Limited. The syntax will change and there's trends but also you can start having a look at trends and using SEO tools like Answer the Public, which has been around forever to look at what are people searching for, what are people saying, what the vernacular, what are the key questions they're asking more of and how can I fill the gap for the information there if it's related to your business and you also want to think things like is there a gap in your customer journey that technology can close?
Is there something even small stuff like Calendly, we have been using Calendly since I started this business or since, I don’t know when Calendly came into effect, but Calendly is a tool that allows you to put in the dates that you're available and then other people can find those without having to like do email tennis of of trying to set up a meeting. I did see, I think that Gmail is now allowing you to do this for free. We are going to be looking at that. Acuity is another scheduling tool. I mean these are small things that if you are thinking, well I don't have the funds right now to have an admin assistant and it's taking a lot of my time to do this. There are so many tools to help you with inbox management that are AI tools.
I mean even the most simplest like predictive text. There's so much that can help you. It's about embracing and looking for those things as opposed to trying to live in some romantic old school world of not having to embrace technology. Also things like, with AI it is here to stay. It doesn't mean you have to fire all your stuff and you see all these people constantly saying, look how much money I've saved by firing three of my people and getting it all done through AI. That's great. But if you've got the funds and you can keep those people on, look at what they can do for you in that time that they're saving because they're using AI tools. Rather than going, those skills can be taken by yes they can, but what are those human soft skills or what are the other skills that those people are bringing and what could they be doing in that time as opposed to I'm just going to work with robots.
That's not what I'm saying. Technology, embracing technology is not about just getting rid of all humanity, but it's thinking how can the two coexist well for your business objectives? And things like social media for all its issues, it's transformed the way that small business owners can get in front of their audiences without having to invest massively in like traditional marketing in one platform you've got access to focus groups, beta testers, magnetic content, ideas, analytics. You can see like straight away what your competitors are doing. You can see what people are complaining about. I mean there's just so much that can be done there. Enable yourself to utilise the technology and not for the technology to utilise you. Those are five areas and some things to think about in each area. You've got environment, you've got finance, you've got product people and technology.
I go into this in more detail in my book Business to Brand, which is now out and available wherever you buy your books. If you are in the UK or Europe or the US it will be out in two weeks I think. But I've seen that a bunch of places are already selling it over there. If you look online, you can pre-order it pretty much everywhere. Please go out and and check out the book Business to Brand moving from transaction to transformation. But this is also the stuff that I work with so many businesses on in coaching or group coaching. Group coaching has officially finished for 2024, but in 2025 we'll be launching that and it'll be starting in March, 2025. If you want to get on the waitlist, you can go to mydailybusiness.com/groupcoaching. If you're interested in all of this and your marketing and looking at that through a perspective of future proofing your marketing, check out marketingforyoursmallbusiness.com and be part of our next round of the live coaching component. As I said, the course is there all the time. You can do it anytime but twice a year we offer some live coaching. Thank you so much for reading and I'll see you next time. Bye.
