Well here’s news for you. Sh*t happens in business. You make mistakes, you lose money, people let you down, you get taken for money and you make more mistakes!
I’ve made quite a few mistakes – so many in fact I think I qualify as an expert in business if an expert is defined as a person who had made all the mistakes in one particular area! In 24 years you can be rest assured I have made my fair share.
Let me tell you about a biggie… April before last, here at my Guildford office we had to make a very difficult decision. We had a whole department that equated to £200k per annum revenue in cinema logistics but they were a phenomenal time and brain drain and didn’t pay very well or promptly.
Now we’d also parted company with a £20k a month nightmare client the previous November and we’d lost another good one due to an IT issue that we had no control over, worth another £5k per month. So in 3 months we effectively lost £40 a month or £480k a year. Ouch!
Poop happens in logistics and it is par for the course that there will be a churn of clients. A further mistake I’d made was to neglect the sales pipeline (whilst building the franchise network) too, so there was a lag in the restoration of our revenue. I then had to retrench which is never pleasant and divert resources to restore our turnover – horrid times.
So you have two alternatives – curl up in a corner and lick your wounds or pick yourself up, dust yourself off and keep on trucking.
As Chumbawamba said – ‘I get knocked down, but I get up again, you’re never going to keep me down’. We did exactly that – dusted ourselves off, cut our cloth accordingly and got back on track.
You will get knocks in the journey to build your business. I know some of you have faced bad debt, some of you have faced losing your biggest clients. The important thing is to get back on plan, as soon as possible and move forwards.
One thing though – it is okay to consolidate for a bit. Because the road to success is never at 45% – it’s very squiggly and sometimes to ensure long term success you need to stop, regroup and then move onwards and upwards.
There’s nothing that a great sales pipeline won’t fix (actually there is – cash flow – but let’s deal with that another time). So I’ll rephrase that – there’s not many problems more revenue won’t fix! I’d say feed your sales big time – because there not a lot of problems in business at least that cant be solved by money and sales is the way to do it.
If you need more help, direction or input then you know where I am.
Here’s a link to the Chumbawamba tune – tap into when you need a pick me up! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kS-zK1S5Dws