RE: McLaren and Aston announce record sales

[DonkeyApple]

Rich_W said:

But rapid expansion always concerns... I hope I'm worrying about nothing

I agree but our fears do tend to be based on historic concerns over the risk of rapid expansion. The reality today is that rapid expansion is not just the norm but a necessity in many areas. As a result the whole VC market place is geared to it and so are the business specialists who sit between the VCs and the shop floor. And management is also now geared and educated to it. Enterprise moves so much faster these days that regardless of the product the need to expand very rapidly, globally and to create a brand image as swiftly as possible is paramount.

In the old days we suffered from multiple lagging issues that would cause a rapidly expanding enterprise to lose its foundations and be very weak/unstable. So many of these issues have been resolved.

Investment procurement which could take years to secure can actually now be done in days in the fastest situations with credit lines easily supplied to infill time issues, meaning that when a business needs to expand or invest in new tooling or deal with an unforeseen issue the stumbling blocks thatbonce made such an issue toxic are no longer there.

Likewise key employment. It used to take years to head hunt the right person and you usually could only source from your immediate geographic pool. It’s now a global market and sourcing essential key people to fit each expansion phase is no longer the serious hurdle/risk that it once was.

Supply chains are infinitely more flexible to boot for similar reasons as are logistics and almost every area of business.

So today, in many areas, rapid expansion is expected, demanded and fully factored in.

I guess what it does do though is make failure to hit targets more toxic? But in the case of Aston and McLaren they opted for Middle East capital which is far less aggressive in its immediate demands, more tolerant of failures and generally considered by more offensive people in the market to be ‘dumb money’.

Sometimes that isn’t good. I don’t believe Aston would have had to do such a poor commercial engine deal as they have if the Board that bought the company out from Ford had had more aggressive backing such as from US VCs. The more focussed VCs simply wouldn’t have allowed the vast amounts of money that were redirected by the board to favour themselves and their business that did not help the business of selling cars at all. But they have weathered that bit of history and seem to be on the up again.