Time to Launch ACC
Time to Launch ACC
The idea of moving to Phoenix kept bombarding our entrepreneurial CEO’s mind. “It was like the rain forest,” he said. “Every afternoon the rain came.” In 2011, in the middle of a recession, we took the plunge and invested $15 million to start another corrugator facility in Mesa, AZ.
Turns out, virtually all the significant local swimmers in box manufacturing had swift currents to advance their economic growth. But the global financial meltdown in 2008-2012 brought a fierce reversal with the riptides. It was enough to make a preacher stop talking.
The mindset in a painful economic downturn may seem an inauspicious moment to launch a company, several core activities can produce a house built upon the pillars of ingenuity, productivity, and competitiveness. Indeed, “The best time to start a business is when it’s hard to start a business.” Our playbook says, in uncertain times competition lessens as established businesses struggle or fold, leaving room for new entrants to take over abandoned niches. In addition, rents or building purchases tend to be lower and quality talents are more available for courageous people who do have credit or cash.
In this perilous start-up time, are hotbeds of opportunistic entrepreneurs – workaholics who have high performance ideas with risks to capitalize on them. We are joined by associates who perform like acrobats walking on a tightrope to garner more attention. Our safety net is a shared culture with an operating plan around it, linking deviations from sales tactics, implement of a review process, collaboration, and accountability. The overhead to grow our ACC is easy to build, but very hard to reduce.
AVOIDING SURGING WAVES
The exciting part is to ask our tech-savvy cohorts at ACC, “Why are customers really buying boxes from us?” I think we bring certainty and confidence to our launch.