Market trends continue to be inconsistent with the consequential effects showing a lack of consistency. No, really!? Who’d have guessed?
And then what happens with such elementary information during our times? Yet more talk of the better business bastion: planning? Pleeeeze….Change the story!
Shifts happened. Measuring returns on investments can be a nightmare, marketing can look like a sink hole and the 80/20 rule… what’s happened to that? Profits continue to be challenged because margins are squeezed, margins are challenged because profit is squeezed – it’s obvious, isn’t it? Talk with anyone, being squeezed is par for the course of business life, however, talk with someone whose own, and their employees livelihood, is dependent on a business which has gains that aren’t worth the resources they use up, any squeeze can easily feel like choking.
Entrepreneur or in general business practice, when it comes to making a move, if you can’t measure it, don’t buy it.
Be it marketing, making a purchase, recruiting staff or any other of the key ingredients to a business, the conditions a proposal enters under alters the angle of the route taken for that proposal: vertical barriers create steeper angles to reach a goal. Without the right entry points and contacts, barriers make unfamiliar practices considerably more difficult, whereas with the knowledge that practice and experience brings, because the ‘solution’ is understood, the difficult steeper angle is prevented and the barriers are reduced.
Steep angles can’t hold much information, they’re the deal breakers.
There’s no shortage of businesses out there wanting to ‘help’ us become profitable (you might even be one of them). My perspective (in terms of finance for business owners) has lenders who measure (by differing methods) the cumulative impact of investment and risk, the saving of a few pennies is significant to them and the bottom line is, `can’t measure it, don’t buy it’. In the main, my and your customers do the same (as a customer I do), we want our money’s worth; can’t measure it, don’t buy it.
Why then do some business owners deny themselves such a simple tool when they’re readying for the right moment to strike out; are they sincerely unaware of the wider contexts of business? There might, for the entrepreneur whose waiting in the wings surveying opportunities, seemingly be advantage over the established business owner, whose misinterpreting reliance on formulaic for reliable. But does that make either of them any safer when they’re being measured, than those having the squeeze put on them? Does being overlooked make a business less or more vulnerable in the greater context of business? Taking my cue from a 3 year old in a squeeze, trying to reason with his mum the necessity for a cupcake, Listen! Listen! You’re not listening to me! Developing control over his world, `You can trust everything at Grandma’s house’ is his assertion in defiance of his mum. He’s expresses his opinions, questions, shares his thinking and after pleading with his mum for several minutes, she gets the measure of him ‘I’m the parent…I’m done arguing with you!’ and he gets the measure of her, ‘I’m done arguing with you’.
