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When the Wind Blows…
Fellow Mancunian geek Simon Wheatley had a little tweet this morning that made me think about a few things.
Best start thinking of things to make with the remnants of a banking system I guess… when the wind blows, build windmills.
Over the last few weeks I’ve been looking around the scene locally, nationally and further afield and tried to work out what is going to happen next. Here’s my general gut feeling:
- A lot of firms are going to go bust. During boom times, mediocrity, a lack of professionalism, no real need to sell and develop sales skills, all bound up with something shiny and slightly interesting can actually pay its own way. No longer. A lot of people have lucked out with poor business skills and zero-thought business plans. That is now going to bite them hard. If you’re running a business without a real business plan, cashflow forecast and a way forward in times of recession, you’re in trouble. If you don’t have sales skills, you need to find them.
- What survives, thrives. Those who work out how to serve needs of users – and more importantly right now, the needs of their own cashflow – will actually grow at paces that will leave many people boggling. This won’t turn into an investment bubble though, because there won’t be much in the way of investment going on for a little while. When the market liquidity improves and money starts to become cheaply accessible again I doubt people will make the same mistake of investing in just an idea – execution is going to be more important than ever before.
- You don’t need investment to survive – in fact, you never did. You just need sales. Whatever it is you think you’re about to do, it has to be focused on sales. Right now is a bad time to set up a property website. It’s also a bad time to get into loan websites or sites that offer credit card deals. If you have the capital to buy an existing site that does those things, right now might be a cheap time to buy though.
I’m still working out my next moves. I have the opportunity to take on some more public sector work which feels sheltered from the storm for the time being, but I’m also trying to work out what the current “windmills” look like in the software space. Low-cost, high-yield projects are hard to come by so it could take me some time to work it out. Watch this space.
