Successful Business Planning Using Client’s Business Model
Sustainable Growth in Changing Markets: Integrating Client Strategy
Understanding client needs and adapting internal processes for resilient business delivery.
Navigating Market Cycles for Resilient Growth
Successful business delivery is always based on client satisfaction. Understanding your clients’ needs leads to loyal customers and sustainable growth. However, sustainable growth is a significant challenge in today’s constantly changing markets. Market analysis history shows clear patterns of expansion and recession.
According to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) in the United States, there were 11 business cycles from 1945 to 2009, with an average cycle lasting about 69 months (just under six years). The average expansion during this period lasted 58.4 months, while the average contraction lasted only 11.1 months. However, the current recession (from 2009 to date) has extended beyond that historical analysis.
Therefore, in economic downturns, distress becomes much more widespread. Are we prepared to lead towards sustainable income growth and manage it to be more resilient to shocks, market turbulence, and risky competition? This article provides recommendations on how to navigate downturns by understanding and integrating client strategy and procurement processes with your internal operations, leading to transparent and firm bidding decisions.
The Challenge of Forecasting in Uncertain Markets
In such volatile markets, most companies struggle to forecast and target upcoming opportunities. The high level of uncertainty leads decision-makers to be more cautious, focusing on risk analysis and cost reduction rather than expansion or maintaining their current position. This often happens because existing systems are incapable of providing accurate analysis of new client strategies and processes, partly due to a lack of data or delayed data gathering.
A robust business model needs a dynamic system that provides an updated, comprehensive overview: “Where are you now?”, “Where is your operation now?”, and “What’s the market direction?” The first two questions should be easy to answer quickly, but many companies face difficulties. The last question is crucial to answer even faster.
Your intelligence and data gathering are only as good as your current system’s ability to integrate with your current situation. This depends on your business development process, your operational process, and your enterprise portfolio management. Incorporating the right data and using the right parameters to manage your enterprise portfolio should be ready to go. For this system to be perfect, it must be built around clients’ new strategies and processes, integrating them with your organization’s internal conditions.
Key Recommendations for Sustainable Business Delivery
So, what do you think your client’s business model would be built around? The answer is clear: optimization, value engineering, cost reduction, and focusing on client needs. Here are key recommendations: Click on each card to learn more.
1. Proactive Opportunity Identification & Risk Re-evaluation
Instead of waiting to discover the client’s new strategy and becoming a victim of market changes, organizations should actively seek new opportunities. These include needs for enhanced project control, project management systems, project commissioning systems and resources, asset management systems, institutional building, and training. Simultaneously, re-evaluate the risks in current projects, recognizing that companies that profited from risk-taking during expansion will bear the financial hit more severely during a downturn.
2. Act with a Full Picture of Current Operations
“Don’t get ahead of yourself.” Never make decisions without a complete understanding of your organization’s current operations, especially confirming project delivery progress against approved invoices and true cash flow status. This also includes assessing your organization’s compatibility and readiness to adapt to new changes.
3. Offer Unique, Value-Added Services
Make your services unique by not just responding to client needs but also by proactively suggesting successful, approved solutions that clients might not be aware of. These solutions could stem from your organization’s accumulated experience. Conduct brainstorming sessions with your team; you’ll be surprised by the innovative, optimization-focused, creative technology, and cost-effective methods they can offer. These unique solutions can become your new flagship products.
4. Monitor & Develop Labor Productivity
Monitor and develop labor productivity through firm measurement, focusing on output per hour worked. This is where project management software, models, and training become invaluable tools. Be prepared with these resources.
5. Stay Close to the Client’s Evolving Mindset
In times of change, historical trends from the USA and Europe show clients shifting their contract approaches, increasingly engaging the private sector to take over project risks through new contract types like Design and Build, PPP (Public-Private Partnership), or even BOOT (Build-Own-Operate-Transfer) contracts. You should be ready to seize such opportunities when they arise. Here, ensuring minimum cost delivery is no longer the sole evaluation metric. The primary measurement becomes the unique value you can add to project delivery, operation, and maintenance.
Anticipating Client Strategy Shifts
Adding more insight about client’s changing strategies, as mentioned above, clients will change how they do business. They will propose new contract types, promote more competition, and remove barriers that inhibit small and medium-sized companies from entering new business segments. They will implement new policies focusing on the development of local human capital, as well as institutions for creating and transmitting knowledge, and linking business with the community more and more. They will shift towards delivering new, developed products. You should have the foresight to be ready for this and even suggest such innovations to your clients.
React Now: Prepare for the Future
Finally, I believe there are limited companies in the Middle East ready for these changes. They are accustomed to the current way of doing business. If companies do not react to integrate their systems with new client processes, they will lose market share. The new system might not be entirely clear yet. However, this is where a company’s intelligence comes into play: forecasting and preparing themselves to be ready when the client activates these changes. For example, the new Saudi 2030 Vision and news from UAE, Kuwait, and Qatar about new client thinking are sufficient signals to react.
React Now, evaluate your current system, and be ready for the future.
Best wishes for all
Ziad Albasir