- …approach the global market >
I’ve found that you need to stay in touch with the global market because it’s very dynamic. You’ve got different things around you where you’ve got different price mechanisms, and different inflation levels that can knock onto exchange rate issues.
As a global business, 80% of our supply chain is in the Far East and Eastern Europe so we’ve always got to be conscious of the dynamics of those economies and the price fluctuations that you get within them.
There’s a lot of hard work and endeavour that goes into researching the market. There’s a model that you use- first there’s unconscious incompetence, where you don’t know anything.
Then you get conscious incompetence where you find out what you don’t know. Then you become consciously competent so that you’re able to do things, but you’re always having to think about how to do them.
Finally, you become unconsciously competent, in that you’re very competent in what you do, and you’re not even sure what’s going on or how you get things done, but you get it done.
And within all that, there’s an element of good fortune, that bit of magic dust. In every business, there’s a point in time where there’s a pivotal deal. If you recognise it when it happens, that’s number one. Two is taking the opportunity when it presents itself, and number three is taking full advantage of that opportunity when you’ve taken it up.
Roy StanleyTanfield Group Plc
