The signs are all around. Benanke is predicting the recession ending later this year. Many entrepreneurs I’ve spoken with tell me business is showing very early signs of movement.
If you’ve ever been surfing or body surfing, you learn one thing very quickly: those waves are coming in a lot faster than you can swim. There comes a point where you have to be paddling for all your worth so you have enough speed to catch the wave as it rises under you. Once you’re on the wave, the wave does all the work. Once the wave rolls past you, you’ll never catch it.
So it is now with the economy.
We Can See the Wave Coming
The wave isn’t here yet but we can see it coming. Now is the time to start paddling so you be moving fast and harness the awesome power of economic expansion.
What does “paddling” look like?
How Has the Game Changed?
First it means carefully assessing how the game has changed in your industry and market. If your business is heavily debt dependent, game over. It will be a long time (hopefully) before we see the irresponsible easy money of the past twenty years. If your business is energy intensive, we’re experiencing a lull at the moment, but everyone I read says look for energy moving back up over the next year or two.
In almost every business to a greater or lesser extent, the tectonic plates of the market have shifted. This is good news for forward thinking, adaptive companies who have rigorous planning processes in place. These are the companies that have been using the recession to research, experiment, retool and train employees. The companies who think the good old days are just around the corner will be in for a rude awakening.
The good old days are gone. The new days will be good too, but much more demanding.
Will You Miss the Wave?
Do you have a formal process improvement program in your company? I speak to hundreds of CEOs every year and pose that question. The affirmative response on average is probably five percent. In this day and age, this is an appalling statistic. If you and your employees are not proactively working to do whatever you do for a living faster, better and cheaper, you are missing the wave.
Technology
If you are not looking closely how technology will allow you to make your company easier to do business with, to provide your employees with the information they need to make decisions that will minimize cost and maximize customer satisfaction, you are missing the wave.
Marketing
If you are not learning to be a more effective, capable and aggressive marketer in an economy increasingly characterized by “kick-ass” marketers and companies who work for “kick-ass” marketers (guess who makes the money?), you’re are missing the wave.
Education, Training & Orientation
If you are not training your people, teaching them how business actually works, how to read your financial statements, how to exercise good business judgment so you get full return on payroll, you are missing the wave.
It is in recession that we really learn what we need to be doing. Most important organizational changes take two to three years to fully implement. The reality is that it is late already to take full advantage of the turnaround. All the more reason to start paddling now.
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