In this video, we meet our new contributor Phil Walker. He outlines the current economic state in the UK, and what small-medium size businesses can do to ‘ride out the storm’.

Hi everybody. It’s Phil Walker from Mettryx here. Mettryx provides senior finance consultancy into small and growing organisations. That’s fractional FD, CFO, services, FP&A consulting, strategic finance consulting.

I’ve been fortunate enough this morning to attend a briefing by the Bank of England around some of its recent monetary policy. I guess not all of you would agree with the fortunate word in that sentence, but it’s extremely enlightening to understand the background of why the Bank of England and the Governor are making the announcements and the decisions that they currently are.

I guess without making comment on the quality of their decisions, but just some of the background to what they’re doing, there’s just so much volatility in all areas of the economy in their decision making, in their forecasting models, that you know, that really comes through in some of the explanations behind some of the decision making that they run through. Areas across the economy, labor market shortages, import and export difficulties, and inflationary pressures. Obviously, there’s most recently the energy crisis, the energy price rise crisis going on. You got the war in Ukraine, still got lingering effects and incomparability from the effects of Brexit and Covid.

So there’s an entire range of issues going on, all affecting the macroeconomic world and decisions that the policymakers have to make or not least or not to forget the political situation in the UK at the moment, the lack of leadership from the  Conservative Party, obviously leading to in uncertainty about fiscal policy.

And, yes, all of that backdrop to an environment where macroeconomic policy decisions taken now take quarters, years before the impacts are fully realised. So the bank won’t know now until twelve or eighteen months time what the real effect of the fifty percentage base points increase in the base rates that was announced last week.

Anyway, with all of that backdrop of uncertainty and kind of the macroeconomic policy has got me thinking about what small-medium businesses can be doing in order to ride out some of this storm. So put together here a couple of videos hopefully to help founders and leaders of businesses, form some view of actions that they can take.

Phil co-founded Mettryx following a 16 year finance career “in-house” across a range of industries, in order to provide senior, on-demand, finance services into SME organisations. His expertise range across fractional FD/CFO duties; FP&A consultancy; strategic finance projects support; international expansion; ERP/EPM implementations.