“A business exists to serve a customer.” - Peter Drucker
Current conditions definitely require a rigorous re-assessment of the security of your backlog and your market strategy.
Rank all project owners that make up 80% of your backlog, assessing their financial strength, access to capital, and estimated impact this is having on their businesses short and longer term, and ask yourself and your team these questions:
- What would be the impact to your company if half of the weaker ones stopped current construction, slowed payments by 30-60 days, and went bankrupt? What if they stopped or slowed future construction?
- Which markets that you compete in will likely grow, remain steady, slow or decline? Why? What will the impact be?
- Which markets could you reasonably adjust to compete in that are either growing or remaining steady?
- What do you need to do to realign or develop your capabilities?
- What do you need to do to be effective with your business development in these markets?
Having an experienced and unbiased third party help facilitate these discussions is one of the best investments you can make.
