Can you see the brick wall?

Last week while in London I was amazed to see Oxford Street as busy as I can ever remember, people hefting bags of high value branded shopping around, difficulty getting into certain restaurants i.e. business as usual. Yet at the same time I had an uneasy feeling that this is not reality. You know that vague gut wrenching whisper that drips what feels like poison in your ear?

Yesterday I heard that passenger flight numbers into Spain are down 16%. Four million people here are said to be unemployed. That’s close to 20% of the working population when the government previously wanted us to believe it would top out at 15%. Property sales have frozen. Our local bars are empty by 10 pm, something that’s almost unknown. There is almost nothing our local bar keeper can do to attract trade. He is feeding patrons well beyond the tapas ideal yet it makes no difference. Apart from local ex-pats, we’ve seen no-one from the UK this year so far. By now we should have seen a good clutch of people. And this in a country without a banking crisis but dependent on two main income streams: construction and tourism.

In discussion with SOMESSO attendees, the broad consensus is that conference attendance is around 40% off past levels. Then I started to call professional colleagues back in the UK. One has just found that the project they were going to work on has been binned. Another says that up until Christmas things seemed fine but in the last week they’ve had to call in receivers on behalf of long standing clients. Another says that previous lines of credit stretching back 20 years have evaporated. Yet another says he’s met his budget but is exhausted at the effort. Are you getting the picture?

Yet  we are led to believe the worst is over. If you’ve watched my video with Umair Haque you’ll know that some think that’s far from being true. At the macro level, Ubikwiti talks about empty cargo vessels clogging up Asian ports. The profession is seeing leading indicators but only in lag mode.

In one call, I suggested the practice consider on-demand/saas/cloud solutions as a way of obtaining real time insights into client finances. Quite frankly, that’s the only way to effectively monitor clients and get that early warning data that might just mean the difference between survival and the grave.

The question you have to ask is simple: are you seeing the brick wall? If so then what’s your response? Can you innovate out of this mess?

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Tagged as: smo09, SOMESSO, Umair Haque