Taking Stock
No, it’s not a big foreclosure-auction sign in front of a house (although there are several in the neighborhood). I live on a main thoroughfare with a brand-new shopping center on the other side.
One reminder – well, a bunch of them, actually – of current problems comes with the large number of empty storefronts surrounding the anchor stores. But the biggest is a dark green modernist building right on the corner of the access road.
It doesn’t take much guesswork and Webpage searches to see that the color scheme and design fill the bill for a Starbucks Coffee outlet. Unfortunately, the building went up this spring just as the Seattle-based baristameister decided to pull back its expansion plans.
The storefront sat empty for a month, before workers appeared to hastily finish the interior. A new sign went up on the window: “Home of a new Wachovia Bank!”
Two weeks later, Wachovia announced a series of financial setbacks. The workers left. The sign disappeared.
Now, after a summer of sitting empty, the building became the scene of more frenzied construction to finish out a set of offices. On Oct. 8, a permanent sign finally appeared; it’s “Wachovia” after all.
When it comes to happy memories in business, 2008 won’t likely be a banner year. All of us know that commerce – in particular, with dimensional stone – slowed down. And it’s still an open question of whether we’ve reached a standard operating speed.
Stone imports, the clearest indicator of how we’re doing, are way down. For this August (the last month available at Stone Business presstime) the amount of granite slabs and tiles entering U.S. ports totaled 107,860 metric tons – and that’s 48.6-percent off from the same time last year.
Take a drive around your service area, and you’ll see a few competitors who aren’t competing anymore. Maybe you’ve received the flyers and emails from auction companies selling off equipment and material.
You don’t need a reminder that these are tough times, or that the economy eventually cycles through to the upside. What you need to do is to assess your own portfolio – not in market investments, but in you and your business.
National governments – ours included – are taking unprecedented steps to bolster the credit market. If you’re not on top of your own credit position, now’s a good time to find out.
Sure, the money’s tight out there, and you may feel that you wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance of getting what you need in a good market. However, you also have an excellent opportunity to see how you stand, and how you can improve your position to access lines-of-credit and major leasing when you’ll need it in the future.
Knowing the local credit conditions will also come in handy in determining how you’ll approach your business in the next year. Unless you’re one of the very lucky few, the era of order-taking is over, and large commercial work (such as my across-the-street shopping center) is going to be rare.
With housing starts going idle, that leaves remodeling. Unfortunately, home-equity loans for the best of customers (and I’ll relate a personal story on the blog this month) aren’t easy to come by. You may need to get actively involved in job financing.
This isn’t a recommendation to get into loan-sharking, but you may want to find and recommend lenders, deal more with credit cards, and possibly carry some jobs yourself. This isn’t traditional by any means, but you’re going to broaden a loyal client base by not only doing good work, but finding ways to make that work happen for your customers.
You also need to look at your personal portfolio and go for the long-term. Don’t stop thinking about new equipment, or moving to that larger shop location. Assess where you’re going to be (or hope to be) 18 months and three years from now. Believe me – it sounds pie-in-the-sky, but setting your track for the future puts you a long way ahead in dealing with this afternoon as well as tomorrow.
If something doesn’t fit in your personal portfolio, and it’s not going to offer a real gain, leave it out. Don’t carry it, stop selling it, or quit doing it. Good investing is simple, and the simple action, as Ronald Reagan would always say, is rarely the easiest.
I’m not telling you to turn down work just because you don’t like something about the project or the customer, or it just seems small-potatoes after some of the big work of the past few years. Think instead about the type of work you’re doing, and the products you’re offering, and keep the mix that brings the best stream of work (and cash) in the door.
Above all, pay attention to your local market and don’t rely on the big brains on Wall Street and in Washington to fix what ails you. Consider that a bunch of people in a bunch of offices made a number of decisions to finally place that Wachovia branch right across the street from me.
Also consider that, the day the sign went up, the deal went down to merge Wachovia with Wells Fargo – and, not 300 feet from that coffeehouse-cum-bank, there’s a brand-spanking-new Wells Fargo branch already open for business. In times like these, great minds sometimes just don’t think … and it’s up to you to mind your business.
Emerson Schwartzkopf can be reached at emerson@stonebusiness.net. His biweekly blog can be found at www.stonebusiness.net and stonebusinesseditor.wordpress.com.
This article appeared in the November 2008 print edition of Stone Business. ©2008 Western Business Media Inc.