The company’s annual risk management meeting

January 12th, 2010

I spend the day in office – what a drag
I am the company ‘worker at home’. I’m past retirement age but the small engineering company still keeps me on the staff for my knowledge on various topics and best of all, pays me a small monthly retainer to be on tap whenever they want advice. There are a few days in the year that they insist I be present and today was one of them. It’s the start of a new business year and they need all the heads they can find to keep things rolling in these difficult times. We are contractors to some major companies in the semi-conductor and pharmaceutical manufacturing industries.

Twenty Ten
The name of the year, 20/10, has a great ring about it, a ring of success. The markets are up and running, things on the street and in the malls are very quiet and things in the business arena are bleak. 2009 was stagnant and halfway through we lost a couple of major clients who said they were changing their business organization to outsourcing everything, and would we like to participate in the bids. We tried one and discovered companies that we had never heard of who were prepared to do the work for nothing. We stepped back and said, ‘after you.’ We let staff go and quietly sat out the rest of the year, hoping for a great improvement in the New Year.

Solar energy
Our tactics seemed to work. We received inquiries for work from one huge solar energy company and a whole slew of small ones. Solar energy will not only save the world, it will save us too, we cried in relief. Here is something we can sink our teeth into. We entered bids, we wrote quotations, we negotiated, we sent senior engineers to courses and refreshers and we learned the solar energy ropes as well as we could. We were ready for business.

Here come the blows
The first blow came when the electric corporation reported that they had totally used up their allocation for purchasing electricity from small producers, like our clients. Everything stopped. Then the electric corporation relented, said it was all a horrible mistake. So we started up again. Then a US senator made speech condemning the use of all the desert land in California for the production of solar power. We stopped again. Weeks passed and nothing seemed to change so we started up again. Now the EPA has announced that the loan guarantees and financing have been delayed. We have stopped again. This one looks serious.

Running a business
We cannot run a business this way. Every time we stop we fire the last-in people. When it starts up again, we rush into the street to look for technical people who quickly become the last-in folks at the next stoppage. We cannot build a budget and it’s impossible to forecast more than two weeks ahead. We live in tough times.

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