Crisis is a good thing !

Crisis in the bike industry is the topic we keep hearing over and over again in the last 18 months. One after another there are headlines of bankruptcy, self administration and financial reports.
Of course we all know the reasons for the crisis or at least we think we do and I am not going to go into details on this topic, there has been too much said already.
What made me think is why some companies went bankrupt while others are surviving and some even thriving these days. What is their secret ? Second thing that came to mind is what will happen in the future ? How about next 6 months, a year and two years ? How will the market correct itself ?
When analyzing the bankrupt companies there was a pattern emerging where you could see that most, not all, of those companies were already in too much in debit before the crisis with the product range offering very bad cost-benefit relationship to the customers. They were not agile in reacting to the market situation, full of managers where nobody actually takes the responsibility and risks to makes the decisions. There was a lot of meetings and micromanaging of things that were not important for the survival of the company, something like focusing on giving vitamin C for a dying patient. A lot of doing but nothing getting done in the end. And this is a huge problem !
What about successful ones. They are agile, making quick decisions some of whom are not popular, even a bit cruel to the employees sometimes. But survival was at stake here and then everything is on the table, it was doing a bad thing for the greater good. Fire 20 people to be able to feed 100 kind of thing. These companies reacted fast in the product portfolio to offer great value to the customers, by lowering the price or by offering more for the euro. At the same time they are aggressive internally to optimize everything and make the company more efficient hence saving the bottom line and still managing to make a profit. It seems to me that not many of them spent too much money on marketing in these times actually. On the opposite the unsuccessful ones spent more because they didn’t know what else to do or wanted to do the hard work. They just rather threw even more money into the bottomless pit.
Emergence of the new companies who are making impact on the market. In 2023 there is a number of new bike makers arriving to the European market. These are mostly Asian financed or owned companies where decisions are made fast and there is no unneeded noise between the decision maker and the executioners. They just work more than others and thanks to that manage to offer more on paper than other. In real life we will se in the next 12 months which will manage to follow up on their promises. What is sure is that they are making a huge impact on the market now and taking their share.
The future. Future belongs to the efficient companies. Some might have made wrong choices during Covid years but if they are efficient they will weather this storm and come out on top victorious. The bike industry will survive, we will just see different players on the field. Opportunities are endless and the ones that make it will be able to rebuild a new and improved Bike Industry 3.0.
Crisis is a good thing !
This strong crisis is like a law of nature, only the strong will survive. It will filter out the weak and the hype companies which came from abundant times. It will filter out the products that didn’t make any commercial sense to start with. It will even filter out some people with some unearned reputations who arrived during these abundant times. It will filter out the unnecessary processes, unnecessary paperwork, actually everything that is unnecessary.
Crisis will provide us with enough pain to move us and make change finally. If there was no crisis we would remain paralyzed because it was just good enough, it was not too good but not too bad hence our inaction.
The result, we will be left with good strong cultured companies, good products, good people and bottom line happy customers because of this crisis.
CRISIS is GOOD !
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