Control the controllables; what goes on inside your facility and team. Yes, and often they are the most important factors determining your organization’s growth and future. However, there are external circumstances that you canNOT control, but that come to bear on your business.
They include your addressable market, political, economic and regulatory factors, the weather and seasons, what your competition is doing and cost of labor and materials.
If we have a small market share, external factors can often be overcome by getting better. But if we have a high market share and there is a slowdown, we can’t avoid it affecting us.
While we cannot control what is beyond our control, we can control our response and the timing of that response to make sure that external factors do not hurt our business much. Sometimes we may even be able to turn what looks like bad news into good news.
What’s going on “out there”? How will you respond?