5 Business Trends That Are Already Shaping Your Business and Determining Your Profits

What you were doing 5 years ago is vastly different from what you’re doing today. So how prepared are you for the next 5 years? And will you profit?

Roger Hamilton will.

Roger Hamilton is a futurist, entrepreneur and visionary. He has predicted the future of markets and technology and continuously shared his insights over the years to closed groups. However, for the past 4 years, he has started to openly share what he’s seeing with larger groups of entrepreneurs around the world.

We took a look at his material from early 2014 to see if it was relevant to the start of our 2015. Here are 5 of the most important Waves of Change from his Fast Forward Your Business tour of 2014.

The Waves of Change

Back in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, we were convinced the future would be all flying cars and pastel-coloured spacesuits. We may not be eating our meals in pill form and having our houses cleaned by robots, but it’s not all bad. At least we’re not living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and the mullet is no longer considered an acceptable hairstyle.

The future may not have panned out exactly as we anticipated, but there are still massive shifts taking place that are already having an enormous impact on your business. If you’re not incorporating these business trends into your business strategies, your revenues could soon be deader than shoulderpads. Surf these waves, however, and your business could be moving at Warp 6 while your competitors are still trying to fix the flux capacitor.

A zettabite = 1 trillion gigabytes.   That’s a LOT of information. With this swell of information come many waves of change. Are you going to surf or sink?

World Wide Wave

Around the world, expectations have gone up while attention spans have gone down. If you want to engage an audience, you’d better say something they care about within the first couple of sentences, otherwise they’re gone. At the same time, traditional advertising models, targeting the broadest possible spectrum of consumers, are on their knees. In a social media world, people want quality, and they’ll ignore anything that doesn’t interest them immediately.

Mobile users now outweigh desktop users. Is your website optimised for mobile? Can your clients and customers subscribe, interact and pay from their mobile seamlessly?

The flipside of this is that, if you produce quality, people will share it, at no cost to you. How do you take advantage of this wave? Turn your website into a channel, redesign it for mobile phones (the percentage of internet traffic going through mobiles is exploding), and create a three-minute video that distils your message into something crisp, concise, and engaging.

Bernadette Schwendt surfed the World Wide Wave of change and pivoted her business from a copy school serving copywriters to an online media channel serving entrepreneurs.

There’s no doubt that mobiles are the biggest growth platform and where most people turn to these days. Will they see Your business there?

Turn your website in to a channel, optimise for mobiles and tablets and create 3-minute videos with your compelling message. It’s easier than you think.

That’s the first of our five big Waves of Change. Now that you’ve got the keynotes, stay tuned for the Wave 2: The Age of Engagement and what it means for your business.

Oh, and join us at Roger’s ‘Fast Forward Your Business’ event in Brisbane on 21 and 22 March (and he’s also touring the rest of Australia, too!).

Ben will be joining the stage with Roger sharing some of his insight into innovation as an accounting ‘Gamechanger’ too.