I’m writing this from a hotel room in Malaysia where we’re attending a conference as part of our strategy to expand the Wrench footprint into APAC and Australia. Not a new strategy, it’s been around for some time. But now more urgent, thanks to recent world events. Meaning: we can no longer rely on the Middle East as our primary market.
Let me share a behind-the-scenes glimpse of what it takes to maintain a global brand and keep it going for decades.
As you know, maintaining is much more difficult than building. Now, even more so, because the world is changing at a furious rate, it’s a world where markets shift without warning and geopolitics can transform business landscapes overnight. Remember the pandemic and how it caught everybody off guard? Today we’re facing another upheaval, in response to which we are once again tweaking our business strategy. Namely: to spread ourselves across multiple geographies and markets. As the saying goes: don’t put all your eggs in one basket. That’s what we are trying to do – create more baskets.
The good news is: we have the first mover advantage in terms of applying AI to project management technologies. Features like our AI control tower and our productivity enhancement tools that use AI for contract review, technical review, bid review and so on are cutting-edge features that are badly needed in APAC and Australian EPC markets, and we are in the ideal position to fill that need.
Even before war hit the ME, we had anyway been planning to expand into new markets; in fact we revamped our website with the hope of shortening the sales & marketing cycle and reaching global audiences directly. I personally oversaw this revamp, as I wanted to be better prepared for a world of AI and digitisation. So in that sense our new direction is merely an acceleration of the old one. It remains to be seen how it will play out in the emerging EPC landscape.
But whatever the future holds, one thing that hasn’t changed is our ability to pivot. It’s been one of our greatest strengths all along. We’ve always been able to recognise nascent markets, to think one step ahead, to anticipate and adapt. This will continue to be our driving force. As we begin a new financial year I’ll leave you with this thought: times and global events and business strategies will always change and the effects will eventually ripple out towards you, the individual. Are you prepared? You cannot control what happens outside but how you structure your mindset, how you orient yourself in the world, how you train yourself to respond to circumstances is completely in your control. My advice: stop being reactive, learn to be proactive. Be aware, be positive, and be prepared.
Then things will fall into place and you can take any change in your stride.