Tide over the latest macro-economic events

As stock markets have slumped in the last couple of months, inflation continues to soar, and interest rates are bouncing back up, many companies find themselves in a stagnant mode. I like to call it: in search of guidance. They look for a sign from the market to understand how bad it might get, they carefully search for a venture capitalist’s advice or reach out to a peer executive from another company.

What does this mean for your company?

Questions that are often discussed in this context are around growth vs profitability, timing of future fundraising and product launches, or others — are being raised frequently nowadays by leaders across various industries from small, medium, to large companies.

Trying to understand the market trend is essential for every business at any point of time and — obviously — depends on external figures that aren’t within a company’s span of control. Currently, the external environment is unique in many aspects and therefore, is even harder to foresee. From a macro economic perspective, the pandemic era was a period in which many countries provided economic incentives (“printed artificial money”) to overcome a crisis that wasn’t driven by economic failure. Interest rates at the beginning of 2020 were as low as 0 (or close to that). This, in turn, meant that monetary measures of reducing interest rates weren’t a valid option anymore — unlike the case in previous crises. On top of Covid’s unique circumstances, the war in Europe has immense implications on the global economy. The dependency of many countries on Russia’s gas and oil resources as well as other products is causing a huge spike in prices. When and how will this war end? Who knows…

All that to say — there are a lot of variables we cannot control. But there are many things that company leaders can control as they aim to position themselves in the best position going forward.

It starts with focusing on the true internal structure — and function — of how the business operates.

Akooda’s partners, similar to the rest of the market, face various challenges — and opportunities — in light of today’s unprecedented environment. As the only Operations Intelligence Platform, we are able to assist our customers in the efforts to overcome this period. Our customers have been able to use Akooda to:

• Improve the efficiency of CSM-to-customers ratio by tracking all outfaced interactions as well as internal preparations and investment within the company.
• Guarantee that their entire organization, from Sales to Product, focused on the most important customers and needle-moving projects, in real time.
• Reduce the volume of attention on bugs
• Focus on features that matter, thus minimizing customers’ frustration, and becoming a more efficient engineering organization.

The ongoing war, inflation, interest rates and other key external unknown factors are important things that as leaders in today’s world we must continue to explore, read, and dig into. While doing that, we should focus on improving our own business, getting the most from what we already have.