The fact is that we are all business people – our jobs are to make more money, to build a network of clients, to make our businesses grow, to keep the lights on.
And because we are all doing the job we have to do, we tend to view the rest of the world as one big business. The reality is, the outside world is one giant business too. We are all competing for the same customers, the same opportunities, and the same revenue. And because we all compete for the same customers, we all need to work together to meet the business goal.
There’s a lot of things that go into making money. Most people who make a living, especially small business owners, have learned the hard way that if you don’t get people to spend their money buying your product, you don’t make money.
Like any other business, success comes from meeting and exceeding revenue goals. But even if you have a good product, if you dont get your customers to spend your money on it, your business is dead.
To make money, you must build a pipeline of new customers. This is easy to do once you have people who are open to making an investment.
So, for example, last week I told my wife I was going to take a vacation. She said she was sick of her job, and so I told her I would work on getting me some business loans. She said she was going to go on a vacation with her daughter and her friends. I told her I did not need loans, and would pay her for the vacation.
With that, I left, not knowing that I may have been right all along. It was not that the business wasn’t profitable, but that the business was built on a foundation of poor business decisions. As if we weren’t already drowning in debt, now we’re drowning in debt because the business was built on a foundation of poor business decisions.
I’ve been a small business owner for over 15 years, and I’ve seen a lot of things fail. I can recall one of the most painful failures of the past few years. It was the first time I ever had to actually close a business. The reason for our failure was the fact that we were in uncharted territory. We were making a decision to buy and run a small business that was in the early stages of being profitable.
We had absolutely no idea what we were doing. Instead of planning and preparing a business strategy, we were blindly following a recipe we found in the internet. In hindsight, I guess it doesn’t really matter how we got there, but in the beginning it was a disaster. When the going got tough, we resorted to the only thing I knew to do: make the decision to close the business as quickly as possible.
The internet is full of books with the most common advice: “just keep it simple,” “just make a plan,” and “just write it down.” That’s true up to a point, but I think it’s also true to say that when you find yourself in a situation where you have no idea what to do, there’s no one else to blame but yourself.