Growth Newsletter

Who’d heard of the term “contact tracing” before March 2020? I certainly hadn’t and yet, here we are, six months later, and all of us know what it means and the importance of it in living in a COVID world.

The sharemarket is all over the shop at the moment. One day up, the next day down. Public company returns are impacted by COVID 19, positively or negatively, dependent upon the industry.

The media is full of bad news about business right now. Firms shutting up shop. Big staff layoffs. Large corporates fighting with their landlords over rent reductions. Forced pay reductions in large professional service firms. Massive losses being booked. A new day brings another dramatic headline that is doom and gloom.

It’s somewhat curious to me how a great number of family business owners decide, one day, to take a step back, but don’t actually prepare the business or their management team for that event. The decision is puzzling and often, the consequences can be devastating. Let me explain.

It was late April 1986. I’d just moved into my fourth home in less than three months, such was life in my first year of University. Precipitated by the last tenants of my share house deciding they were moving away from Sydney, I hit the Uni notice board and found my newest, new abode.

In over 30 plus years of working with the owners, managers and employees of family businesses, as well as employing my own staff, I’ve observed there is a fundamental difference between people in terms of their outlook and whether or not they control their own lives.

As I’m writing this, Melbourne has entered Stage 4 lockdown and, for the first time in it’s almost 180 year history, is experiencing the imposition of a night time curfew. For weeks, the news out of Victoria hasn’t been great and the imposition of Stage 3 restrictions doesn’t appear to be bringing the COVID 19 menace under control.

From time to time, amongst the different family business clients I work with, patterns emerge. The locations may be different, the industries unrelated, yet the issues can be the same. At the moment, the pattern is around slipping standards.

As you would know from last week’s edition of Growth, my wife and I have recently returned from a week away on the beautiful far South Coast of New South Wales. It’s not normal for us to head to cooler climes mid year, but with border restrictions in place at the time of making our booking, we decided to stay closer to home.

Last week, my wife and I took the opportunity to spend a week away on the far South Coast of New South Wales. This is the part of Australia that through the Christmas/New Year period, was devastated by horrendous bushfires that destroyed vast amounts of bushland and cruelled local businesses at their busiest time of the year.