Helping You to Profit from Commercial Sense

In this book, we work on the assumption that your business is profit-maximising. An important aspect of this aim is cost-minimisation, and BC most certainly plays its part here. If you sit on your organisation’s board, you may well take a particular interest in this section. After all, unless this aspect of BC makes financial and commercial sense, you aren’t going to want to implement it. If you aren’t at board level but are going to need to gain the support of the board to get the green light for BC, this section helps you make your business case.

We break down commercial sense into three areas: we discuss customers and business opportunities in this section, and give the financial and legal side of things their own section later in the chapter: ‘Supporting Financial and Legal Aspects’.

Considering your customers

Businesses are nowhere without customers – the organisations and individuals that give you money. Therefore, anything you can do to please and retain your customers must be a good thing.

BC is a valuable tool in this area because it helps businesses retain their existing customers by:

Providing reassurance that the business will make deliveries and meet orders.

Demonstrating diligence by being able to explain how things will keep running in the event of a disruption.

Allowing you to deliver a service when other companies may be failing.

But BC also provides you with a competitive edge in another way. Approximately 20 years ago, customers and suppliers increasingly talked about quality management, with more customers wanting reassurance that the orders they were placing would be delivered to their requested specifications. Today, customers are demanding more than ever. At one time having a BC policy wasn’t a prerequisite, or even a consideration, when doing business, but now we’re seeing more and more organisations asking companies what BC arrangements they have in place, before signing or re-signing contracts.

If you can say that you have BC arrangements embedded into your organisation and can satisfactorily answer pertinent questions about those arrangements, you’re a step nearer to retaining existing contracts and winning new ones.

In this book, we arm you with all the information you need to fulfil your potential to meet new or existing customer needs and protect your organisation and its reputation.

Recognising opportunities

Having BC embedded into your business demonstrates that you take the reliability of your service seriously, which you can use as a competitive selling point when pitching for new business. Firms that are able to keep operating when all around them are grinding to a halt have an opportunity to fill the shortfall for those customers that have been left short.

When disruptions hit a particular geographical area, such as flooding and major industrial accidents, almost always some businesses keep going while others are unable to do so. Think how much effort your business has put into winning and retaining customers – and the value that’s at risk if you let them down. Ask yourself whether you really can afford not to have BC in your firm.

‘Yes, we can do that for you’ is one of the most satisfying things to tell a customer, and BC can give your organisation the ability to say these seven words – and mean them. The business world is, of course, not just about protecting what you have and shouting ‘Steady as she goes!’ from the helm, whether you’re in choppy waters or not. It’s about looking for, creating and responding to opportunities when they arise and being in a position to grasp and hold on to them. Although nobody likes to take advantage of other people’s misfortune, in reality business misfortune is rarely simply unlucky. When a business fails one of its customers the reason may well be that it didn’t have a continuity, alternative or backup plan in place – which enables your business to step in.

At the point when the customer is desperately ringing round to fulfil an order – having been let down by a supplier and not expecting to get a positive response because the incident that affected the regular supplier also affected others in the area – you step forward and say, ‘Yes, we can do that for you. I’ll put you through to Sales to take the order.’

How satisfying and what a great position to be in: you’re one step closer to a new customer and a little bit nearer to your sales target for that month.

So, how were you able to say that with such confidence, when so many other suppliers couldn’t help? Well, most likely because of one of these two scenarios and one or both of these reasons:

Your business has been able to recover more quickly and continue after the recent flood, flu epidemic/pandemic, industrial fire, road closure and so on (delete as appropriate).

Your organisation has a lean, flexible management structure and operational capacity, and your staff understands the business and is focused on the things that really matter.

because . . .

Your business has a business continuity system in place. You were able to access your plans quickly and efficiently from suppliers who adopt the same BC outlook as you.

You just got lucky: you happened to have over-ordered that particular item last month.

If your answer in the ‘because’ section is the second one, in this book we support you in moving to the first option – helping you to get a BC system in place. However, if your answer was the first option, we’re going to help you test and review the quality of your BC arrangements.

In most cases, your actual plans aren’t what save you, but the planning that goes into creating them. To paraphrase General Eisenhower: Planning is everything, the plan is nothing.

By investing in BC and making it part of your business you’re putting your business into a position where it can take advantage of opportunities when they arise, which enables you to say, ‘Yes, we can do that for you’.