Recovery strategies and support for SMEs

Achieving recovery through being more agile and resilient will become the priority for many Lancashire businesses over the forthcoming year.

Professor Simon Bolton, an expert in innovation and director of Edge Hill University’s Productivity and Innovation Centre, outlines his five key tips to help businesses recover and become more resilient to future crises.

• Actively gather internal data and evidence to understand your true business position. This helps focus attention onto overall sales, performance by product/market sectors, customer profiles (identifying new, retained and lost business).
• Engage with your customers regularly to understand their changing priorities and requirements. Make sense of why people are staying, leaving and or becoming new customers.
• Communicate the quantifiable benefits of the solutions you are delivering to solve customer challenges in your sales communications. This helps you to demonstrate how you are delivering success in challenging times.
• Enhance your digital readiness to improve core business processes and customer experience. This will enable you to build ongoing resilience against any future crisis.
• Continually revisit and update your plans to ensure relevancy of your offer and business models. This will go a long way to help the business manage uncertainty more confidently.

Support for SMEs to help deal with current challenging times

Edge Hill University’s Productivity and Innovation Centre has a resource of support for SMEs to help them plan their recovery from the coronavirus crisis.

The centre’s Dynamic Recovery Framework is a flexible and highly effective package of tools focussed on supporting the businesses to deal with the current challenging times.

It helps to determine adjustments needed, pinpoint specific priorities and activities, to provide a clear understanding of the steps to achieve change, along with the tools to carry out the required activities.

You can Download the Dynamic Recovery Framework template from the Edge Hill University website to get started. There is also further information on the Centre’s Dynamic Recovery Framework dedicated web page.

Edge Hill’s experienced team in the Productivity and Innovation Centre can offer additional support and guidance on your specific challenges and how you can plan and put in place your recovery plan. 

To discuss your recovery planning or for more information about the Centre’s services including its  Innovation Sprint Programme, please contact  Edge Hill’s Productivity & Innovation Centre on 01695 657756 or by using the centre’s online contact form.

Edge Hill University works in partnership with Boost to help Lancashire businesses grow.

To keep up to date with the latest Boost news, events and support, register for our monthly newsletter.