ABSTRACT
This chapter is primarily concerned with the relationship between your business and the environment in which it operates: it is about placing your business within the bigger picture. Every business that stays in business meets the needs of a group, or groups, of customers. Those needs can vary hugely not just across industries but within an industrial sector. Smaller businesses typically succeed through serving the needs of an identified group of customers, and grow by finding more customers like their existing ones. However, the ability to grow and build a business is, inevitably, influenced by outside forces. The environment in which a business operates may be benign, as a result of factors such as favourable government legislation, a strong economy or new, enabling technologies. Equally, the environment may be a challenging one, perhaps as a result of tighter regulation, a slowdown in the economy and new technologies which disrupt the existing structure of the market. By their very nature smaller businesses – and, come to that, many larger ones – cannot alter or even modify such outside forces. But, they can anticipate, assess and often exploit environmental changes through systematic evaluation, planning and adaptation.
