Innovation key to resilience

| November 16, 2020

What do you do to ensure your business is resilient?

As a a family owned farm machinery manufacturer based in Toowoomba, we look at an overall business resilience by making sure we are always innovating.

Having a popular product one day doesn’t not ensure it will be popular the next. We also try and spread our geographical risk by looking at new markets.

If one market is in drought, another may be better off. In more micro terms, we have focussed on getting a core staff that we build the business around and then making sure we aren’t actually too dependent on any one of them.

If we need to scale up during busy periods, we can do this with casual labour, outsourcing work or buying parts from overseas. I believe it is working at the moment because we have gone through a period in Australia where it was so dry, a full $4 million of sales we saw in 2017-2018 ceased to exist in 2019-2020 and yet we didn’t drop in revenue terms overall.

It will be good for the business if we can now take advantage of some more widespread rain in Australia to help us build an even more solid base ahead of the reopening of export opportunities sometime in 2021.

What do you do to ensure your business is resilient?

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