The Stocktake

I was working on a fast-moving contract handover recently - the kind of situation where everyone wants to move quickly. We still took the time to build a risk register before anything happened: what could go wrong, who's responsible for catching it, how we'd know early.

Around the same time, I was talking to a business that's genuinely ambitious about growth. No risk register. No contract register. No real sense of their own portfolio - what's expiring, what's exposed, what's already fragile.

I don't think that's unusual. Moving forward just feels more productive than sitting still and taking stock.

Growth just means more contracts, more clients, more moving parts sitting on top of whatever you didn't already know about. If you don't know now, you'll find out later - usually at a worse time, and usually from someone else.

Take stock first. Yes, it's slower but it's also the only way the growth that follows is actually sound