Companies told they need resilience to survive

TO survive in the tough business environment of 2010, small firms will have to deliver value for money, and will need resilience, as well as the ability to adapt, delegates attending yesterday’s annual conference of the Small Firms Association were told.

A number of speakers stressed the importance of keeping the current situation in perspective and not allow themselves to be overpowered by the huge scale of the current crisis.

In 30 years time, Cilian Fennell, an award winning TV producer and a director of Stillwater Communications that trains firms to build their profiles, said what is going on at present will be “just a paragraph” in our history books and most of those involved will be forgotten.

“It is as tough as hell out there”, and in that sense it was vital that business people kept a “perspective” on what was happening.

Economies recover from very difficult situations.

The bottom line is that the business community in the past has always bounced back even when recovery looked impossible.

Mr Fennell said it was important that those who run businesses “avoid becoming victims”.

Dylan Collins, who left Trinity College in 2000 and founded Jolt Online Gaming, said one of the keys to making such headway in business was the “number of mistakes” he and his colleagues made.

Since then he had founded and sold several companies in the online gaming space. Two of those were bought by Nasdaq-quoted firms.