There are a lot of things that business owners have to define about their business. They have to define their company’s voice, their brand, their strategy, and their workplace policies – but they also have to define the entire ethos that the company lives by.
There are many different ethoses that you may wish to consider for your business, but there is a core consideration that is important enough to warrant special attention: should your business ethos be proactive or reactive?
Defining these terms
- Proactive businesses seek to identify problems before they actually become problems. If a business is proactive, it seeks to anticipate issues and resolve them. There are a number of different ways a business can be proactive, but placing an importance on monitoring is an essential part of this; from opting to utilize managed IT services that provided continual surveillance of a network to regularly interviewing staff members to ensure contentment, proactivity focuses on establishing a base layer of competence that it seeks to maintain through continual monitoring.
- Reactive businesses do the opposite. Rather than focusing on continual monitoring, their approach is to wait for a problem to occur and then seek to resolve it as quickly as possible. This would mean waiting for the IT network to break and then hiring a firm to fix it, or assuming staff are happy unless someone makes a direct complaint.
As you can see from the above, proactive and reactive business ethoses are the exact opposite of one another – and there are benefits to both.
The pros and cons
Proactive businesses tend to be more focused, as the need for continual monitoring keeps attention on business operations at all times. In addition, proactive businesses tend to enjoy superior cost management, as they rarely experience unexpected costs. For example, with a proactive approach, a business will never need to suddenly find the funds to repair their entire network, as they will have been able to identify – and rectify – the problem before it became so severe.
The only potential downside of a proactive business is that the need for monitoring can be expensive – but this is usually offset by the money saved from rectifying problems early, when they are likely to be smaller and less expensive.
On the other side of the debate, there are no real benefits to a reactive business. Reactive businesses are always running behind schedule, rushing through fixes and hoping that they work. There are also severe financial downsides to reactive businesses, as unexpected large bills have the potential to put the entire company’s finances in peril at very short notice.
So: should your business be proactive or reactive?
Given all of the facts outlined above, we can conclude that you should definitely seek to establish a proactive business. Proactive businesses are able to anticipate problems in advance, ensuring that issues are outsourced or handled in-house before they escalate to a point of being disastrous. If you wish to ensure business continuity, then there’s really no counterargument: proactivity wins, every single time.