In a good market you don’t have to try hard to win and keep business.
As soon as the market goes down, the tide goes out for all of us and
suddenly work is cancelled with little notice and your competitors come in and
undercut you on price taking your customers and your revenue. This is quite a
painful experience.
It’s what you take from the experience of losing badly that counts. You
will lick your wounds for a while, but when you have overheads to pay, staff to
pay and a large mortgage you don’t have time for self-pity – it will only
bankrupt you.
When you take a beating, you are forced to look at the market and your
customer base with no illusions. It gives you a clear focus on what you need to
do to win and retain work, and it gives you the drive to go for it.
There are no one-size-fits-all solutions to building more resilience,
however, there are some generalisations – none of which are new – which can be
applied.
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket
- If most of your revenues are coming from one or two clients, do
everything you can to find other customers. Sure long term contracts are great
steady sources of income, but that can all come to an end with only a day or
two’s notice. If you aren’t making money elsewhere you are going to become a
smaller company very quickly.
Pride cometh before the fall – it’s when you think everything is going
well that you need to be most worried. I have experienced this many times, and
see many others go through the same thing all the time. A contract isn’t won
until it is signed. Payment isn’t received until it is received. Take nothing
and no one for granted – you need to have a mild dose of paranoia at all times because,
yes, your competitors are out to get you.
Life isn’t fair – and bad luck doesn’t just come in threes – it can
come in non-stop waves. I know of a small business owner who was on the
receiving end of an unfair dismissal lawsuit, a tax audit, death of his parents
in a car crash, discovery of large scale employee theft, his partner leaving
him taking the kids, and he had to find a new house – all in the space of 9
weeks. Do you think he had time to productively work or win new business in
that time? One or two of those matters would reduce the average person to a
gibbering mess, and he had all of them. That’s an extreme example, but you can
have bad luck, personal tragedy and good outcomes all at the same time.
Keep on swinging – a good boxing analogy – keep throwing punches as you
might just connect. It doesn’t matter what is happening, you need to stick to
core business and keep doing it. Yeah, sure you are great at this aren’t you -
resilience is your middle name after all. Your real test is getting knocked
down a few times a year, every year for a decade. This tends to sort out those
who can keep on going and those who can’t take it anymore.
There’s a silver lining to every cloud – there are always but always
opportunities. You need to free your mind up to look for them, and encourage
others around you to offer them too.
Lead by example – if you aren’t doing the right thing in terms of
selling your business, how can you expect your people to. They will pick up on
your cues and if you don’t show you care about the future, then they won’t
either.
You discover a lot about yourself in times of adversity and hopefully
it is good. Keep on swinging!
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