The time will never be just right.

I recently had a very frustrating meeting with the Managing Director of a large piling contracting business.  He told me that until the timing was “just right” he would not react to what was going on in his marketplace.

Bit he had already lost two major clients, new competitors had emerged and one had actually taken work away from them.

He admitted that he had not seen any of this coming.

BUT HE SHOULD HAVE!

Regardless, he didn’t seem at all willing to act.  I felt compelled to point that his indecision was not only hurting the firm financially, it was also causing his team to lose confidence in his leadership.

Losing market share and giving ground to a new entrant was not a smart move.

Eventually he accepted the need for action and began to muster the troops.

He said “Ok we have wasted enough time, no more excuses we need to act decisively, we now need to find enough time to fully address our various problems and all the challenges we face.”

Furthermore, he reasoned that his firm’s various set backs were no longer acceptable and needed to be reversed quickly.  His whole team volunteered to make enough time to get the firm back on track.

Once the decision to act had been made, I was soon pleasantly surprised at the amount of progress that was made over the following weeks.

It was interesting to witness, that once the leader and his team had decided that they wanted achieve something bad enough, they all made the necessary time regardless of other commitments, self interests or obligations.