Often, I have written about uncertainty as something the only certain phenomenon around your business. But, the most significant problem that comes with uncertainty is the unpredictability of the future of your company.
Now, the question is how we can prepare ourselves for successful managing of the company, no matter what type of business is, or what size it is, small or bigger one. Managing this thing is your own responsibility as an entrepreneur. It is simply the pressure to prepare yourself for the future.
Now, what remains us other except to start to dealing with the planning for the future, or predicting the future? So, we start with the prediction of sales, prediction of costs/expenses, marketing plans, business plans and so on. Quickly will come next year or the next few years. You conclude that nothing from your plans is near the reality, or things just don’t happen as you have planned or predicted.
The Unpredictability of the Future Case
Even the most traditional businesses have such a problem. It is the case because they are focused on conventional techniques for predicting the future. In most of the cases, these techniques are incorrect.
Three years ago, an entrepreneur told me, that his business is such as is because there will always be a need for his products. It is food, and people will always need to eat. Today, that business does not exist. Simply, because the entrepreneur then used predictions that were based on all predictions, “Last year I had this amount of income, the next I will have X% more than last year.” Let’s cover some reasons why happened this as a result of this type of entrepreneurial mindset.
3 Reasons Why Traditional Prediction Techniques Can’t Help You?
- Such a way of thinking doesn’t recognize the appearance of competition. Not any competition, but the competition that will give a completely different value. It doesn’t matter that in our case we are talking about the food industry where changes are less likely. They are still possible. The new competition besides the value that offers, they also provide other things. It can be the different and innovative approach to communicate with customers, innovative sales, innovative working processes and so on. All this will affect and here impact on the failure of a business that until this time was a successful business. So instead of increasing his income for X%, he started to lose money with a factor of 2X.
- Such a way of thinking doesn’t recognize the changing needs of customers. Customers are not the same today as yesterday, nor tomorrow will be the same as today. It’s the only thing that is known about the customers. The entrepreneur in our case has not realized yet that those customers who are with him today, tomorrow they may not be. They want changes, have a changing flavor, want new things. For their money, they have the rights to afford what they want, not what someone will offer to them. Because customers were not included in the plans for the future, or predictions of the future, they simply can’t meet their new needs in this business, but in some another.
- Such a way of thinking doesn’t recognize changing technology used by business processes. Yes, except the competition and customers, there is also the technology. If somehow we can predict the appearance of the competition or customer needs, what will happen with the technology is something difficult to predict. The unpredictability of technological changes in the business in our example was one of the reasons for the failure of a successful business.
The Meaning of Unpredictability for You and Your Business
You can notice that the problem is not that someone failed to predict the future. The more significant problem here is the inactivity of the entrepreneur also reflected in the total inactivity of the whole business.
What does this mean for you and your business?
- Uncertainty leads to the total unpredictability of the future of a business. Uncertainty is simply reasonable and common thing in and around every business. Thus, the predictability of that uncertain future becomes something hard. At last, it leads to the completely wrong forecasts and predictions. But, you cannot entirely remove the uncertainty, unless you come in the situation when your business no longer exists. So, my recommendation for you as an entrepreneur is not to predict the future, but to create the future.
- Unpredictability does not mean the end of the business but requires merely different behavior from your side. If you can’t predict something, you can’t say that it is beyond your capabilities. Such thinking is not thinking of a persistent and successful entrepreneur. My recommendation is to forget about things that you know now and change your mindset from inert and reactive to proactive style. It is much better for you to have failed ideas, instead of a failed company.
