I’d ask you to also consider the following passage from a day long gone by. I discovered it in a speech by my favorite central banker, Richard W. Fisher:
Every now and then the world is visited by one of these delusive seasons, when ‘the credit system’ … expands to full luxuriance: everybody trusts everybody; a bad debt is a thing unheard of; the broad way to certain and sudden wealth lies plain and open; and men are tempted to dash forward boldly from the facility of borrowing.
Now is the time for speculative and dreaming or designing men. They relate their dreams and projects to the ignorant and credulous, dazzle them with golden visions, and set them maddening after shadows. The example of one stimulates another; speculation rises on speculation; bubble rises on bubble; every one helps … to swell the windy superstructure….
It renders the [financier] a magician, and the Exchange a region of enchantment…. No ‘operation’ is thought worthy of attention that does not double or treble the investment. No business is worth following that does not promise an immediate fortune…. The subterranean garden of Aladdin is nothing to the realms of wealth that break upon [the] imagination.
“Could this delusion always last, …life …would indeed be a golden dream; but it is as short as it is brilliant.”
Now those last words weren’t written by Fisher or Roosevelt — but by Washington Irving. He was talking about the “Mississippi Bubble” fiasco of 1719. And even though it was penned almost 300 years ago, it reads like it could have been written at the height of the bubble a few years back. Chalk it up to the human condition.
Before you begin hiring a support staff, it’s important to ensure that you’ve developed a staffing strategy that will help your business work most efficiently. While many businesses don’t have an official document detailing their staffing strategy, you may want to at least ponder various components of such a plan that would enable you to make staffing decisions that better align with your business objectives.
