Andrew Stevens - Director of Small and Medium Business at Vodafone outlined his five key lessons and five characteristics of successful SMEs

“It’s a topic which absolutely fascinates us at Vodafone,” he said. “We call them ‘Fit for Future’ businesses. So these are businesses which we believe are ahead of the curve. They’re self-confident, they’re ambitious, they’re driven and they always seem to be prepared for whatever the world throws at them. And let’s face it, over the last couple of years the world has been throwing quite a lot at us. So it’s a really useful skillset to have at the moment. “We’ve done a lot of research on this as a company over the last couple of years on a pan-European basis and we’ve looked at companies and what we’ve tried to understand is what are the traits and characteristics of these businesses which makes them successful, which make them better prepared and allow them to capture opportunities more than some of their peer groups. And what we’ve found interesting as we went through it, is that it wasn’t scale, or the sector, which made a difference. The same topics kept coming up again and again. They were more linked to mindset and behaviours.” Lesson number one was all about adopting a positive attitude to change