Or “How To Go Broke Faster!”
In this down turned economy it seems that people are doing a lot of running around like a chicken with their heads cut off. Like Chicken Little crying “The sky is falling!” and then doing the equivalent of encouraging it to fall. I hear stories like this all too frequently now:E = Employee
BO = Business Owner (body odor?)
E = So tell me again why we took on this job? It’s costing us more to do than to we will make!
BO = I like to stay busy…
E = But you will spend a lot more on it than you will make!
BO = Busy is better. I can still pay you if we get this job.
E = You can STILL pay me if you don’t take it. In fact, you can afford to pay me for a longer period of time and we can work on finding good work that actually pays more than it costs.
BO = Well, I still want to be busy.
A letter from the Editor to BO! (Not, you know, Barack)
Dear Sir;
Consider staying busy working ON your business and not avoiding making the critical decisions for the long term. When you take on a ‘busy’ job to that costs you more than you make just to keep your employees you are not helping anyone. You are, in fact, losing money faster. If you want to pay your employees, then do so.
Have your employees help you:
- Brainstorm on ways to make the company more efficient.
- Work on communications and training
- Look for other markets – tap into their brains – they are seeing things that you may be ignoring. The old rule that the owner/manager is always the last to find out holds a lot of weight.
You can work on:
- Marketing
- Planning
- Sales
- And about a million other things you have been avoiding!
My next post will begin a series that might be of interest to you – The Return on Investment For Writing a Business Plan. Subscribe to the RSS Feed here so that you know when the posts are uploaded.
Bart Gragg
925.757.7473
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