One of the most underrated and undervalued areas of perception, or intelligence, or planning, or consideration – contingency.
Contingency is having cash in the bank that you don't spend on luxuries in case there is a problem.
Contingency is having a little bit too much staff in your business so that people don't burn out.
Contingency is having 3/4 of a tank of petrol instead of running on fumes.
Contingency is safety and stability, and a foundation from which to grow.
It's been over 7 years since we designed the practice, now from a piece of A4 paper, trying to fit it into a place where there were 2 burnt-out houses.
There were 4 buildings we could have built on there, and we started off just building one, but because two other people came in and were desperate for two of the buildings, we were able to build them for them, rent them to them, and then sell them. It allowed us to roll back into this after all the horribleness of COVID, with the money for the sold buildings straight back into the pot, a huge contingency.
It was like a defibrillation for our business, a massive cash shock, thump thump that got our heart going again, got us alive, got us back to being fit and healthy and able to move forward, and then from then on, we left a space for us that we could go to later if we needed it (contingency again). Now we need it, and so very soon we're going to be looking at putting a spade in the ground to build unit 4.
We have one or two wrinkles to get over before that, but it's coming soon enough, and that will allow us to use our contingency again and to move our revenue from that site to five times what it was when we first entered.
But it's more than that. When we were designing the site and building it, there were a lot of questions I was asked as to whether I wanted things in place, things that I might not have needed then, but I might have needed in the future if we became successful.
We built a building which is, in effect, modular, and so when we build Unit 4, we'll be able to change the internal structure of Unit 2 to suit us better, to generate more revenue, more stability, and more capacity.
Today, under the direction of Stuart, our IT director, our gigabit line is inserted, installed, and will start running. From the very outset, we had the ability to put a gigabit line into play for our internet. I knew that we needed that, I knew that we would need it later, even if we didn't need it now, and so fast fibre on a lease line (if everybody else's fibre goes down, ours doesn't) is essential for our business, where our practice management system, our finance system, our custom relationship management system, and our telephony is all based on the cloud.
That was a contingency that we built and designed 7 years ago, and now we're accessing it.
Finally, I offered a job to someone last week, as I said in the blog, from over 7 years ago, that's contingency too.
Contingency isn't just cash in the bank, or internet capacity, or parking, it's relationship building, it's trust, it's turning up when you say you will. It all scales later, but when later arrives, you'll be glad you started then.
Blog Post Number - 4555
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