I'm definitely not a fan of Mr OLeary and, although I understand he's trying to influence decision makers to minimise damage to his business, this sort of scaremongering doesn't help anyone by further polarising opinion and pushing people into shouty mode once again.
What I do agree with though is the need for a business to plan for worse case scenario exactly as we would for any other strategic issue likely to effect your business. Although we're only 70 odd people we're having to do exactly the same as all we know is that the rule book is going to be ripped up and we don't know:
a) when the new one will be ready
b) when it is ready, will it be almost exactly the same as the old one or so different as to have massive implications for our business
I'm sure there will be positive outcomes for some (although have seen no
actualpositive business outcomes yet related to our decision, anyone got one?) but we have to plan for possible worse cases and in the meantime react to the resulting outcomes from our Brexit decision so far. For our business there have been two main outcomes to date:
1) raw material price increases as a result of the crash in sterling knocking about £100k off our profit over the last 12 months with further increases of about 3% coming into force in August. Our actions as direct a response to this has been to reduce spending in a few areas -
slightly lower pay increases across the business (none for me
), hold off on recruiting unless absolutely necessary, postpone phase two of our Cap Ex plan and revise our budget for 2017/18 to take into account lower margins - less spending on people, development & kit
2) significant uncertainty for our eight EU staff (two French, one German, four Polish and one Italian) all of whom have been in the UK between 5 and 27 years and now are feeling quite unwelcome. Two are Senior Managers, all are extremely hard working and valued members of our team and would take some replacing. It has been much more difficult to put in place meaningful actions to reduce their concerns as obviously we have no more idea than anyone else what the outcome will be. So far we have started a discussion group to allow concerns to be aired, committed to covering any additional costs (visa, additional stealth 'tax', etc) within reason and supporting applications for British citizenship.
In terms of planning for other possible outcomes fair to say we're sitting on our hands a bit as not a scoobie where this will go for us. We directly export around 10% but almost all of our customers are reliant on a strong UK economy (who isn't!) and seamless flow of goods and services across a range of EU countries. 80% of our materials are imported so we are trying to work with the few remaining UK suppliers but they have all become niche specialists over the years and don't have the capability or products the industry needs let alone the costs.
Even a basic SWOT analysis throws up so many possible scenarios that it's impractical to look into cover actions for more than a handful and as a small business we're really only thinking of economic/business issues let alone the political, socio demographic and even longer term implications for political boundaries/military action, etc
Thought some might like to hear from a business actually dealing with realities we've encountered as a direct result of our decision.
Anyway, that's enough business babble, here's my personal issue: I've just about gotten past trying to figure how the f*ck Cameron thought it was a good idea to ask the least qualified people in the country (me and you!) how to run the country but I still can't square it that anyone still thinks they will notice any difference except in their pocket.