If we’re all honest with ourselves, we have to agree most small businesses are short-handed. In my 30 years of business consulting, I would estimate 40% to 50% of my client/franchisee interactions have something to do with staffing. Short-staffed, as a condition, can be caused by a number of other conditions, and “short-handed” can come in many forms.
The emergence of private equity interests indicates that bigger money sees opportunity in our enchanted forests, but also brings “outside” influence that will forever change the landscape.
One of the challenges in making predictions is being blindsided by items you could never have seen coming. Before last year, imagine someone telling you the country would be shut down for months, you could not go to a restaurant or church service for months, college basketball would stop the week before March Madness, and most schools would be closed for months (or in some cases, a year).
While small businesses are unable to make mistakes or survive failures on the same scale as Apple, it should not be expected that employee performance will always remain flawless.
Over the past 12 years, I managed a restoration company in Mesa, Ariz., before moving on to be the CEO of a Xcelerate Restoration Software, a job management system my partners and I founded. In my role leading a large, full-service restoration company, we serviced a significant volume of commercial and residential jobs.
As I’m writing this, we are nine weeks into 2021, and I have posted a news item regarding an industry acquisition or merger almost every single week. Some of the deals are with industry suppliers and vendors, but largely it’s restoration companies. In most cases, one company purchases another, but in others, a private equity firm has come in and made an investment.
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