Hatch Ideas

As part of the launch of our Guide to Business Resilience, we reached out to a number of smaller business owers to find out what business resilience meant to them.

In this interview, we speak to Yemisi Mokuolu of Hatch Ideas, about what business resilience means in their industry.

What does business resilience mean to you?

Knowing when to start and when to stop.

What kinds of changes have you made to reduce overheads in the current climate (if any)?

I had to move from being an agency to being a consultant.

How has the energy crisis impacted your business?

Because I work from home, absolutely. My bills went up a thousand percent.

What is your approach to debt and finance?

Reduce your overheads and focus on increasing your income.

To increase my income, I offered more affordable and immediate services to my clients and went from providing big contracts to a few clients to small contracts to many.

How do you nurture your customer relationships?

I'm very mindful about having a process when I communicate with them.

Establishing boundaries. Being respectful, responsive and rewarding.

What measures have you taken to attract and retain talent in a tough climate?

I've had an internship and volunteer program. I think it is important to have a strong vision and engage with those that share your vision.

I always have clarity in my business where I can support people in their own skills development.

I try to have a very professional approach when managing people.

Obviously be good and nice. Keep promises.

Have really good communication.

Communicate goals and have moments where I can actually assess what's going on and be vulnerable and learn and listen and guide and be guided. And being very clear with expectations.

How important is innovation and technology in future proofing your business and give an example of where you've invested in it?

Once the product or the service is solid then we can innovate (make it better).

I've learnt that the market doesn't understand big innovation anyway.

You can only really succeed if you innovate a very little.

I like innovation because it's there to make things better, to create better services, etc. Technology can help to make things more efficient.

Affordable technology can help democratise things, which is very important.

But, the most important thing is getting your business offer tight and delivering it well in the first place.