It's been almost a month since my last post. I intentionally left it as such because I wanted to really get a sense of how things have been over the last while. I'm basically trying to create the outside view for myself. God love the internet for helping.
There have been 2-3 good days, but the rest pretty crappy. Things are bad and getting worse potentially. Namely because something I've been saying for 6 months is finally happening, and that sucks.
We have no work.
The sales team has closed 1/5th of the amount they need for us to break even and we're 1/2 way through our fiscal. The math ain't hard to do. What does that mean for us management-types? Well... it means we're being forced into pushing the projects we do have so the teams have work. Under any other circumstance the decisions that are happening now would be chastised and almost mocked for being so outrageously stupid. But I'm learning that when you're light on work, the stupid becomes the prudent pretty fast.
And that piece is new, basically everything I've learned and been told in management seems to have gone out the window. I'm sure it's because people are panicked and stressed, but still... A bad idea when times are good may still be a bad idea.
What I'm not sure is if this is the norm in organizations or if this place is an anomaly. I've never worked in a place where the sales team has had such little success. And really never had that be the problem of the operational side of the organization. Maybe that's the joy of a small company, but it sure doesn't feel that way now. I liked the lack of bureaucracy when I came her, it was refreshing. But I wasn't counting on the added amount of panic that seems to go with it.
Small companies need a special type of management team for sure, but can the group that builds also sustain and grow? Or do different people need to do that? And which one am I?
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