Now, you know me, I’ve got an enquiring mind… I love to learn about people and their lives so I asked him to tell me more. Turns out he’s pretty good. Good enough to be competing at the World Championships here in the UK. He’d trained hard and felt ready for the competition but on the day there was one big problem. The event was a bit of a shambles. 

Despite arriving at 8am in the morning, my buddy didn’t get called in to fight his round until gone 5pm! A whole day of waiting while people floundered around trying to work out who was on when. But that wasn’t the biggest problem. The venue itself was an ice rink. Yep. You heard that right. An ice rink. So the floor that the martial artists were fighting on was ice. 

Now, they had put rubber matting down over the ice rink to give them a grippy and soft surface – however, it seems they’d forgotten one thing… Fighting requires quite a bit of physical exertion. And that makes people hot and sweaty. And when you put hot and sweaty next to ice… the ice melts. So throughout the day the ice started to melt and the mats started to soak through. Not ideal for fighting really. It kind of got me thinking… In business (or sporting events!) preparation is key. 

As a business owner, you have to have superhuman organisational skills, exceptional forethought and the discipline to hold it all together. You have to think through all the potential risks, circumstances and butterfly effects – and be prepared whatever happens. 

At Millennium, we’re all about planning ahead. We’re always reviewing and refining the way we do things and looking for ways to improve our processes – like applying and renewing our ISO 9001 certification in Quality Management. 

So how about you? How prepared are you in your business? What do you do the think ahead and plan for the unexpected? I’d love to hear your thoughts…