Propelle

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 Ayesha (Fuller) Ofori, Founder of Propelle, about what business resilience means in her industry.

What does business resilience mean to you?

As a business, being able to withstand turbulence regardless of where it comes from.

What kinds of changes have you made to reduce overheads in the current climate?

We've had to cut back on anything that doesn't directly impact our objectives and key results for the next two quarters.

How has the energy crisis impacted your business?

We work remotely four or five days a week so the impact has been neglible.

What is your approach to debt and finance?

We have no debt as we are funded by equity.

Therefore we have no pressure to meet repayments or worry about expiry dates.

That being said though, I am very focused on company finances, down to the last penny.

How do you nurture your customer relationships?

We are very active in nurturing our customer relationships especially as we are a community focused and driven business.

Our customers are at the heart of everything we do.

We actively engage on a weekly basis (several times a week through various channels) with our customers.

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

I have found that there has been a lot of great talent available on the market due to layoffs at larger firms.

This has been great for us as it means we can hire very good people who need the work.

I haven't taken any special measure to attract talent.

We typically naturally attract people who align with our company mission.

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

Essential - I think innovation and technology are crucial in any business in this day and age.

If you don't focus on both, you'll eventually become redundant.

Our dependencies on tech will increase and you have to innovate to stay relevant.

We've invested heavily in tech recently to make our business more scalable, so we can reach and manage tens of thousand and one day hundreds of thousands (or more) of customers.