It’s Over!!! We’re out of recession, job growth is up, unemployment is down, sectors all across the marketplace are showing signs of growth – “Let the good times roll!!”
It is good but the feedback from our prospects and customers alike is “Oh Crap! Here we go again”. There is a sense that as a country we could do another “Boom-to-Bust” all over again. So as a business owner how the hell are you going to set your business up so this time so you can capture the growth but also allow you to right-size if you need to.
Reviewing all our customer data since 2009 the central thing that was missing from almost all businesses in the last growth cycle was lack of “Leading” indicators with weak or no systems. What do I mean?
The only indicator was “Sales” and maybe “Cash” (Bank balance). Costs really weren’t an issue – who cared, right?. Processes and systems were a nice to have but “we’re making so much money why should we bother with them”. The sad truth is that if we don’t learn from the sins of the past we will repeat them again.
We are hearing and talking to business owners that are caught in a growth cycle, which is great, but the pain now is that the business is struggling to cope with the growth and thus not achieving their full potential.
If you do nothing else over the next month, can you please put leading indicators/metrics/KPI’s in place and where ever you hear creaking or feel strain in your systems, sort them out now because as the lungs of the Celtic Tiger begin to expand you’ll get stuck in the cycle all over again.
