I had lunch with my accountant last week, and his clients are mainly small to medium-sized businesses. I was very interested in his analysis of what’s happening out there.
He said that some of his clients have seemed paralysed and ineffective over the last couple of years, whilst others have used the economic situation as a reason to double their efforts, and have done really well. What was interesting was that he didn’t see any link between the actions of the business owners and what line of business they were in. Two businesses in the same industry could be getting wildly differing results, based purely on the chosen behaviours of the business owners.
Then, on the way home, I was listening to the radio and there was a panel of entrepreneurs discussing some government announcement or other. What particularly caught my ear was a fabrics and blind shop owner in Ayr, Scotland. He was telling his sob story of how he used to employ 13 staff but that was now down to just one part-timer, and yet his business rates, charged by the local council, had gone up, whilst his business had shrunk.
This was interesting to me because of the similarity of his business, both in location and line of work, to David Browne and his family, who run the Scottish Shutter Company based in Dundee. In contrast, their business has soared ahead over the last couple of years and their staff numbers have increased.
Whether you are an accountant, or a radio phone-in host, there is no getting away from the truth here. The reality is that there are people in your sector and industry who are doing really well right now, and there are others that are about to fall down and die.
A big part of determining which group you are in is quite simply how you think about your business – in particular, the questions you ask yourself. Try asking yourself this one every day: “What can I do, right now, today, to make things better?”
It works for me!
