By Brian Mitchell, Managing Partner & CEO.
Hello out there! Feeling nervous? Silicon Valley and Signature banks both needed a bailout to prevent a domino effect and the big banks are now forecasting lower GDP for 2023 largely due to the stress on the smaller banks. This likely means startups and earlier-stage companies will be that much more scrutinized in terms of raising capital among other ripples. Interest rates continue to hover at two-decade high levels. When people and institutions get nervous, they tend to get conservative and park their cash reserves. When one loses a job and income stops coming in, it’s not exactly the best time to take the family on that expensive safari trip – same principle.
So what can you do about these macro issues? Not much. However, I heard something talking with a favorite CEO client of mine earlier this week and he said “the obstacle is the way”. I’ve been thinking about that sentiment a lot over the past 3 or 4 years, trying to stay strong in what has been a lot of up-and-down turbulence.
I’ve ranted on this before – none of us can individually “correct” market shifts because they’re inherently correcting themselves and it’s ALWAYS an imperfect near-term process. Not quite three years ago during 2Q and 3Q in particular, it felt like the sky was falling on a lot of us – the obvious health scares, but also the professional and financial health scares. The uncertainty. Some businesses thrived, but many more struggled. I get it! Recruiting tends to be a lagging indicator of macroeconomic waves. When foundational confidence is solid to strong, companies expand and invest in new initiatives, markets, products, which all require people at different levels. When foundational confidence is uncertain to weak, those investments are often put on hold and internal op-ex audits take place, which pause or kill projects. That process unfortunately can have a big impact on people because salaries and benefits equate to significant costs. It’s the too many people in the boat theory…can’t have the entire vessel sink.
So that’s all about the company and I’m describing gloom and doom. There actually is an upside. I also wrote about this recently and the market fundamentals are simply not the same catastrophe as some previous era market correction/recession circumstances like 2020 or 2008/2009. So although I commented there’s not much you can do about these quantum issues out of your control, you can still take personal inventory and personal initiative. If you’re a CEO or manage a P&L or lead a sales org or simply lead a household, you have budgets, you have opportunities, you have inflection points to navigate. Sometimes you can’t see something coming to take out your feet unexpectedly – like the SVB scare or a job loss. However, you can anticipate other factors that straddle both professional and personal lives and make some bets on yourself. For example, if you’re leading a company or revenue responsibility and you recognize a slowdown in market receptivity to your core product, perhaps there’s a tangential product or service all of your same customer/prospect constituents could benefit from? Get passionate about solving problems for others and the money will follow. Yes, I understand this is an oversimplification, but how complicated does it need to be? What are your assets? What are common problems your clients (or alternative prospect sectors) are experiencing? How can you support them?
If you’ve been caught up in a downsizing and you’re concerned about paying the mortgage and private schools and just keeping things whole, how can you do it? What “side hustle” have you been ideating about that solves a problem or exploits an opportunity or disrupts an old paradigm? What steps could YOU take to build this side hustle into a solution/product/service? Is there an online business you could implement inside of 3 or 4 months that might build into something more substantial over time? It’s not “I can’t do that”, it’s “HOW can I do that?”. It’s not “I can’t afford it”, it’s “HOW can I afford it?”. It’s a lot of what Angela Duckworth calls “GRIT”, which is essentially the power of passion and perseverance or what Napoleon Hill states is the “starting point of all achievement: desire”.
I’m not trying to rah rah speech away serious concerns, sometimes survival itself is winning. Sometimes it’s darkest before dawn, but the obstacle is actually the way through. Dig in, focus on what you CAN do and take action. The obstacle is the way.