When the business hit its usual seasonal trough, the people who’d acquired it lost their nerve.
I didn’t.
Not because I’m calm by temperament. Going through quieter sales / rougher times…is still rough on my soul lol.
But it’s precisely because I’d seen this exact dip before, every year, and I knew what it was. In Singapore a brick-and-mortar business runs into a handful of predictable troughs: Chinese New Year, school holidays, ghost month, Christmas. Patients don’t vanish. They reschedule around the calendar like everyone else.
I’d lived through the cycle enough times to read it as weather, not crisis.
The professional managers couldn’t.
The default: activity as theatre
People who answer to shareholders can’t afford to be seen doing nothing. A quiet quarter isn’t a season to them — it’s a gap they have to fill with visible motion. They needed something to show. “Here’s what we’re doing about the downturn”.
So we did things.
We tried different advertising approaches. We spent money. Pushed sales and package bonuses as year end sales. The return on all that motion was about -5-5%. Yes, it can also lose money.
Say it plainly: a whole quarter of spending, effort and meetings, to move the needle five percent — inside a trough that was going to end on its own anyway.
That’s not strategy.
It’s a performance of strategy, staged for an audience that mistakes motion for management.
What I actually did — the boring part
While they were buying motion, I was using the trough for the work you can only do when it’s quiet:
- Tightening the systems that break the moment volume returns — front desk, scheduling, recall.
- Training and cross-training staff while there’s slack to absorb it.
- Fixing retention and follow-up so the patients we already had came back.
- Strengthening the referral relationships that feed the upswing.
- The unglamorous maintenance and R&D you simply can’t do at full capacity.
None of it photographs well. None of it makes a good shareholder slide. You can’t point at it in a meeting and say look how hard we’re fighting the downturn.
But it’s the whole difference between a business that merely survives the trough and one that’s positioned the moment the trough ends.
By year-end, after the season turned and the quiet work turned out to be load-bearing, the business was up.
Without a sweat.
I also allow myself, the business and the people some slack. It’s just like that during school holidays or celebration months. People are celebrating. Or they’re just away. That’s it. Screaming does not help it at all.
The principle underneath
The managers and I were solving two different problems.
- They were solving how do we look like we’re responding.
- I was solving how do we be ready when the season turns.
Theirs is reactive and visible. Mine is preventive and invisible.
And here’s what I’ve watched play out in business and in families both: preventive competence is systematically undervalued, because it doesn’t perform. The person who quietly stops the fire from starting gets nothing. The person who runs into the burning building gets the photo. Most organisations — most people — reward the second and barely notice the first.
I’d rather be the first. I’d rather do the boring, unsexy thing that actually works than the dramatic thing that only looks like work.
The seasons aren’t an emergency to a steward; they’re the terrain. You don’t panic at winter. You prepared in autumn, rest and enjoy in winter, and restart again during spring.
The recognition
The cycle was never the problem.
The panic was.
The performance show was.
If you run anything long enough, you’ll meet people who need you to be visibly busy to feel safe. The discipline is refusing to spend real resources buying their comfort — and trusting the boring work you did when no one was watching.