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These are challenging times for busineses and the clever ones are doing everything they can to reduce overheads. The success of The Business Centre in Barry shows that quite a few are making…
THE SMART MOVE
I’ve worked with many hundreds of businesses over thirty years from accountants to zoos (seriously), from sole traders to blue chip companies. Some of them have been what I call ‘successful despite themselves’. Basically this means that they’ve been lucky - yes they worked hard, yes they took risks and yes they had tough times but they always seemed to land on their feet. For the rest of us, and I include myself in this, it’s always felt a little harder.
Sooner or later, you start to learn, experience kicks in and the lightbulb moments seem more obvious. It’s not that you’re not bright, but when you’re in business, often you’re so busy that things that are so ‘obvious’ to others slip you by and you only see the consequences when it’s too late. Overheads are a classic example of this.
The number of times I have sat opposite someone while they pour their heart out about how the bank won’t lend them the ten, fifteen or twenty thousand they need to keep the business going and I’m sitting in a fancy office looking around the room at the expensive desks and chairs and every other gadget that money can buy (having already passed a brace of less than modest German saloons in the car park) and while the person I’m talking is saying how did it get to this, I’m thinking… overheads.
It’s easy to let them get out of control. I’ve done it myself. Back in the late eighties, I had a lovely little cheap office in the centre of Cardiff. I was doing very well. I thought I was a businessman. I was very, very wrong.
As the business grew, my bank manager suggested I move to the Bay - “It’s going to be the place to be,” he told me. So I moved, signed a lease on a large office, employed more staff, leased a top of the line phone system, bought the latest office furniture on a loan and set about my global takeover. Guess what happened next…
1990. Recession. Work dried up. I had to lay off staff. Ran out of money. I’m stuck with a lovely big office with no work and my previously enthusiastic bank manager’s respnse to every request I make is “no”. Back then we didn’t have serviced offices like The Business Centre. If we had, my business might have survived. As it was, it didn’t, and neither did my marriage… and I lost my house... but I’m not bitter.
Now if I’d have been in a serviced office like The Business Centre, I could have scaled down instantly and when things picked back up, I could have scaled back up too.
Moral of the story, well there are several… Watch your overheads - keep them lean. Look for flexible solutions when it comes to premises. Don’t let your ego run away with you. Don’t listen to bankers (or someone who sounds similar). Take responsibility. Your business destiny is in your hands.
An accountant friend once told me to look over a spreadsheet of everything I had spent in the previous year and highlight everything I hadn’t needed. It was some of the best advice I ever received. Today I do it before I write the cheque. Mark Roberts
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