Across North American the economic situation seems to be improving. We are certainly not back to boom times but overall confidence seems to edging back up and we are seeing signs for cautious optimism for 2010. Most believe we have come out of recession and the debate seems to center around how quick or slow the recovery will be (my personal bet is slow and steady.) As we enter recovery the renewed growth will present contractors with significant opportunities for growth but only if they have the people and systems in place to take on the extra work. This makes now an ideal time to invest in IT systems.

The market is currently running lean. Very lean! The recent recession definitely had the effect of shaking out some weaker competitors and shrinking just about everyone. As the business returns there will be huge potential for growth especially for those with capacity. For everyone else there will be a race to add people quickly enough to grow. I believe that people will be the limiting factor for growth through late 2010 and 2011. The challenge in all this is that recruiting and training new people is very time consuming. This is where IT investments come in.

If you want to grow by 25% adding 25% more staff is probably not feasible. You need to garner some of this growth through productivity increases in your existing staff. This means more training but also more IT spending. If you have a system that you are comfortable this could take the form of getting some consulting time with your provider to get deeper into the software you already have. It may also mean looking at new modules like mobile and portal products which can dramatically increase productivity. If you are not comfortable with your system then this is probably the time to have a look at something else. There is no sense in training up new people on a system that is holding you back. Better to spend the money getting them up to speed on something new. The turnaround time is a unique time to get more value from IT because the spend you are making is aimed at reducing the need to hire rather than from cutting work or positions. It is much easier to not hire someone than it is to let someone go making getting the expected return much more likely.

Even with growth still a few quarters away now is the time to invest. If you wait too long to push for productivity improvements then you will already be in a growth period making it too late. During the last boom how often did you think about making a change in IT only to realize that you were running too hot to spare the time? You may be tempted to give it more time but if you wait until growth starts to ramp up you will need to hire in a hurry to keep up with demand and will likely backburner IT. Sounds like a wonderful problem to have but it would be even more wonderful to be able to take full advantage. Adding long term commitments in the form of new people now would probably be a bit risky but smaller IT investments are probably money well spent.

I will leave you with final piece of data to help push my point home. The second quarter was Jonas’s weakest quarter for new client acquisition in over 3 years. That was following a similarly weak first quarter. Q3 has been a different story. In August it has been like someone flipped a switch and we are on track for a near record quarter even after a slow July. Other contractors seem to be feeling what I am feeling and are gearing it. Hopefully we are in for an exciting 2010. Will you have the systems and people in place to really enjoy it?