Fear of change and failure to implement in business

Today we bring you another blog post from our Chairman Will Farnell, he shares his experience from the latest Accountex panel, and as always, some helpful and inspiring business advice.

As well as cooler evenings and falling leaves, Autumn brings with it a flurry of conferences and exhibitions for the world of accounting. This month I attended one of the flagship events, Accountex Summit North in Manchester.

These events give a great opportunity to meet and discuss evolving trends with our technology partners but also our peers from across the country. I am fortunate myself that I also get to share some of what we are doing as a business speaking at these events – a bit more on that shortly.

Having attended industry events as a visitor, exhibitor, and speaker over the years, looking at the discussions being had, provides a really good indication of the market dynamic and what accounting firms, in our case, are struggling with. We have been fortunate at Farnell Clarke to have been some of the very earliest adopters of new technology and news ways of working not just in the UK but globally as well. Its therefore positive to see the narrative changing over recent years showing that many accountants have recognised the need to change what they do and how they do it for the benefit of their clients.

The technology vendors have changed over the years too, we have seen large technology eco-systems develop around the core tools such as Xero, Sage and QuickBooks. We have at our disposal both general and sector specific tools that we can integrate for our clients to their core accounting software to help them run more efficient, effective, and ultimately profitable businesses. Tools to manage payments, customers, projects, and so much more. If you have not spoken to us yet about how technology can help in your own business, there is no time like the present.

I spoke on two sessions at the Accountex event, the first was centred around moving from analogue through digitised to fully digital. Perhaps I will share more on that one on another day. For now, I want to share a bit about the second session which was all around failure to implement.

Regardless of the business sector you are in, failure to implement is a risk to us all. It’s easy to think about this as being technology focussed but it is much more. It may be a failure to implement new processes, failure to try new ways of working, failure to implement that new marketing strategy, all have the same result and its often not positive. This is ultimately around a failure to change and as businesses we simply do not achieve our fullest potential if we don’t constantly evolve what we do to meet both internal and external drivers for change.

We took a straw poll of the audience and the single biggest reason for failure to implement was ‘time’. Others included fear of change, the skills needed to change, information overload and ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’.

I want to briefly touch on the first two, time and fear.

We will never have enough time. The issue for failure to implement is not a lack of time it is simply a lack of prioritisation. OK it’s a bit more than just that. Firstly, we have to prioritise the time to deliver the change we want but we also have to treat any change as a project. It needs the necessary budget and resource and if it’s a big enough priority with the right project management you will successfully implement the change required.

The second is fear of change. Change is never easy. However, in the Covid pandemic we saw that we can all make the changes we need when the driver for change is strong enough. Look at how many businesses went from 100% office working to 100% remote in the space of a few days. This showed us we can do whatever we want when the driver is big enough.

If we are at a point where we know we need to change then make the driver for the change as strong as it can be, why are you changing, who is it for and what will the world be like for all stakeholders after the change?

The final point on fear of change is to turn it on its head and think about the fear of the consequences if you don’t make the change, when you know you have to.