Building better businesses insights report 2027 is your chance to share your experiences.
The pressure every leader recognises
Ask most business leaders how things are going right now and you’ll rarely get a simple answer. Costs are unpredictable. Decisions that used to take a day now take a week because there’s more to weigh up and less time to weigh it in. Technology is moving fast enough that keeping pace has become a job in itself and the people question, finding, keeping and developing the right capability, hasn’t gone away just because everything else got harder. Running a business well is not getting any easier. Running one badly has never been more expensive.
You’re not the only one feeling it
If that sounds familiar, you’re in good company. In conversation after conversation with the leaders and advisers we work alongside, the same undercurrent comes through: Not panic, not crisis but a steady, cumulative pressure to keep the organisation working well while everything around it keeps shifting. Nobody has this fully solved. The businesses that are coping best aren’t the ones with no problems, they’re the ones who’ve got better at understanding their own and acting on what they find.
Why we’re launching Building Better Businesses
That’s the space we want to explore properly, rather than leaving it to instinct and anecdote. So today we’re launching Building Better Businesses: The Alcea Annual Business Insights Report 2027, our first Annual Business Insights Report and the flagship publication of a wider Alcea Business Insights Programme.
Not an AI report. Not a growth report.
This isn’t an AI report, and it isn’t a growth report. AI matters and it will feature wherever the evidence says it should but it’s one part of a bigger picture, not the whole story. Growth is only one destination among several. Some of the leaders we’ll speak to are scaling; others are improving profitability, reducing complexity, preparing for investment or sale, strengthening resilience or simply trying to build something less dependent on any one individual. What connects them all is a shared need to keep improving how the organisation actually works.
Eight themes, one core question
The core question running through the whole programme is straightforward: how are UK businesses adapting to become stronger, simpler to run and better prepared for what comes next? We’ll explore it through eight recurring themes: Leadership and Direction, Operational Effectiveness, People and Capability, Technology, Data and AI, Commercial Performance, Change and Continuous Improvement, Governance and Risk, and What Comes Next.
How the findings will be built
The findings will come from real conversations not desk research. Over the coming months we’ll be talking to business leaders, professional advisers and clients across UK sectors, in 45-minute, informal discussions built around a consistent set of questions. Every contribution is anonymised by default and nothing, no quote, no example, no detail, is ever used in a way that identifies a person or business without their explicit permission and sign-off first. We’ll share emerging themes and interim findings as the evidence builds, well ahead of the full report, so the insight starts working for the business community long before publication.
Built to run for years, not one report
This is deliberately a multi-year undertaking. The themes and the core question will stay consistent from one edition to the next, which is what will let us track genuine movement over time rather than publishing a series of disconnected snapshots. Building Better Businesses 2027 is the first chapter of something we intend to keep building for years to come.
Get involved in building better businesses
We’d love for this to reflect the real, varied experience of running and advising businesses across the UK and that means we need to hear from people actually doing it. If you lead a business, advise one or work closely with organisations navigating this kind of change, we’d value your perspective.
If you’d like to get involved or simply want to know more about the Building Better Businesses programme, there are three ways you can get in touch:
- DM @Rachel Stileson LinkedIn
- DM @Ellen Bishopon LinkedIn
- Drop an enquiry to our Alcea contact us pageand we’ll reply with an email to organise a 45-minute call with you.