With Christmas time coming up- it’s easy to just focus on the task ahead. But it’s also important to make sure your business is future-proofed.

Dynamic Business asked founders what their businesses are doing to make sure they are future proof.

Jake Colvin, Co-Founder, Director of International Operations, Owlet Baby Care:

The best method for future-proofing your business is to create gold standard products or services that meet the needs of your target audience. At Owlet, we’ve spent tens of thousands of hours researching, developing and testing products with new and expecting parents to ensure our offering delivers more than our competitors.

Speak with your customer community and understand what they care about now and anticipate what their needs will be in a few years. Above all, listen to feedback. Ask what your customers would improve about your product and then align their suggestions with third-party research results (i.e. your Net Promoter Score) to prioritise the list of actions. By continuously learning, iterating and watching for market opportunities you’ll be in a greater position to ensure business longevity.

Sam Allert, Chief Executive Officer, Reckon Australia:

“Your business needs money to survive. As such, steady cash flow should be the first move to improve resilience. Regular cashflow forecasts are important to keep track of what is going in and out, and it’s particularly important to leave room for late payments or unexpected repairs. Even if your business is profitable, a lack of cash in the bank can cause problems.

Tracking physical cash is particularly difficult, meaning digital payments are the best option where possible. Online tools can be used to automatically record financial activity, making it much easier to forecast goals and identify financial challenges before they exacerbate.

Resilience also relies on adaptability. Cloud tools are a great option for growing businesses, as users can benefit from a pay-as-you-go model. When it is time to expand, cloud subscriptions can be grown in tandem with the pace of the business or dialled down during more challenging periods.”

Dr Aron D’Souza, Founder and Managing Director, Sargon:

Future-proofing a business requires looking at the future in a very different way. It’s not as much about what might happen in the next five years, but rather the next twenty to fifty years. So, a truly future-proofed strategy prepares companies to disrupt themselves, before others disrupt them.

Our business, Sargon, is disrupting an industry whose incumbents are more than a century old. We have developed defensible competitive advantages and allocated capital to innovation. It has required us to think, and act, like entrepreneurs.

Disruption does not happen overnight. Amazon planned and executed their strategy for twenty years before its power to disrupt truly came to the fore. Salesforce, AirBnB and Netflix have similar stories to tell.

‘Creative destruction’ is the true motor of capitalism. Companies must look through the uncertainty, towards the far future, with plans that recreate themselves to continually drive the process of value creation.

Yanir Yakutiel, CEO, Lumi:

Ensuring business longevity and sustainability demands a long term approach and making sure that we are never too settled on our laurels, particularly given the increasingly saturated nature of the small business lending market here in Australia. Clayton Christensen coined the term ‘disruptive innovation’ back in the 1990s and he used it to describe the emergence of a unique technology which allows a whole new population of consumers at the bottom of a market access to a product or service that was historically only accessible to consumers with a lot of money or a lot of skill. This resonates strongly with our core team philosophy in bringing to market a compelling and sophisticated lending solution for small business owners. At Lumi, we are constantly looking at how we can disrupt the landscape for small business lending in Australia and our customer-first approach combined with our intelligent credit-decisioning means we are able to provide fast and secure loans quicker and more effectively. By continuing to invest in our platform and team, we are driving an ambitious growth strategy that will see us continue to grow and thrive in the next five years.

Stuart Craig, Chief Executive Officer, Asia Pacific, Crestron:

Whether you’re in IT or interior design, the key thing to making sure your business remains relevant is ensuring you’re always ahead of the customer’s needs. At Crestron, we have made it our mission to help our customers stay ahead of the curve. Being solution orientated and offering bespoke solutions is key to ensuring our business is around in the next five years. Staying in touch with what our customers want is important, but it is also vital that we keep an eye on the future. Our role as a tech leader is to make sure that we are anticipating the needs of our customers, then setting and creating both the trends and technology that will be the norm in most businesses and homes within the next few years. Looking forward, we anticipate a wealth of changes lead by IoT innovation, big data analytics and Artificial Intelligence to keep challenging us and our customers, as we all look for greater efficiencies and collaboration at work and at home. Our dedicated research and development team is constantly listening to customer feedback and exploring market forecasts to evolve our technology offerings and help keep us one step ahead. We are also actively identifying opportunities to offer our services to new vertical markets and working with our extensive technology partners to broaden our channel and customer pipelines. Sabri Suby, founder and Head of Growth at King Kong, King Kong: My business, King Kong, is in a service based business, so a lot of our business strategy is ‘team’. To future-proof we make sure we have a great team and that we always have a core of potential candidates. The first part of that is providing a really good workplace for our team to work, making sure it is a really good environment. Also upskilling them and teaching them more than any of our competitors are willing to do.That reputation gets out there – it’s a small circle. We take groups of people with no or intermediate knowledge and put them through our online training at King Kong academy –to turn them into seasoned marketers. That allows us to future-proof the business in terms of always having a highly skilled team to be able to carry out the work and have the ‘King Kong way’ embedded in the way they carry out tasks. George Lucas, CEO, Raiz Invest: