Self-aware organisations recognise that anticipating the peak of their curve is a critical business issue, one which they need to have strategies in place to deal with before the apex is reached.
Here’s some clues for you:
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- The amount of cash the business is throwing off reaches unfeasibly high levels.
- There are no obvious things to invest the cash in. The options are debatable; it comes down to judgement and belief.
- Visionaries sell out of the market all together and move into a different space.
- The margins you are making allow new entry competitors to enter the market with a different value proposition and take business from you by not setting such a high margin target. They accuse you of being ‘greedy and exploitative’.
- Increasingly the market-place is made up of ‘me too’ competitors, and consolidation starts to occur.
- The directors start selling shares or/and the owner(s) starts attending mysterious ‘off-site’ meetings.
- The conditions of entry into your market-place change. New regulations, technologies, demographics etc. kick-in.
- Customers start asking you for things you considered they would never want a year previously (so you did nothing about)
- The regulators step in and say, this can’t go on.
- You see your boss on TV being door-stepped by journalists on his/her way to meet with lawyers, before ‘voluntarily’ going on to a police station.
