Success In Business Isn’t ‘Rocket Science’…But It Is A Science.
Success In Business Has Some Key Fundamentals, Which If Overlooked, Will Make It Difficult To Be A Success In Business
Success in business is more than just ‘common sense’…
There are no guarantees to success in business, but there are some key fundamentals, which short of certain ‘Acts of God’ incidences, will almost guarantee your success. If you had received a dollar, pound, or euro every time you heard someone say that ‘knowing your numbers’ in business is ‘common sense’, how wealthy would you be by now?
Whenever I hear someone tell me that some aspect of the key business success principles is ‘common sense’ the first question I am compelled to ask them is “Yes, but is this ‘common sense’ approach to business actually ‘common practice’ in your business?”
More often than not, I find the answer is an emphatic ‘No’, which leads me to wonder ‘why’ success driven and intelligent individuals and teams in business can lose focus on the basic success principles of measuring, testing and reporting all their critical numbers in their business on a regular and systematic basis.
‘Numerical Mastery’ is the language of success in business…
I am a ‘HUGE’ Warren Buffet fan. Mr. Buffet says it best – “Accounting is the language of business, if you can’t speak the language, it is difficult to win the game of business!”
I personally have extended that statement to “Numerical mastery is the language of business…” The reason for my amendment is because most business owners mistake ‘Accounting’ as simply the financial numbers, when in fact, it really does encompass all numbers.
Numerical mastery involves all aspects of the critical numbers for your business. This includes financial numbers, yet also includes marketing, sales, team KPIs, stock holding…and the list can go on!
Starting a business is simple…can it be too simple?
Having been involved in Business Coaching since 2001, I often find myself going through a mixed array of thoughts and feelings from bewilderment to amusement that in our great societies today we all need a License to drive a car, we can’t do certain employed roles without a qualification or certification, we need a License to own dogs etc, yet to start and run a business we simply have to register a company online (often not even that) and away you go – you are now in business.
These same businesses can take on vast amounts of contracts and debt, employ countless numbers of people, commit to lease premises and equipment for specified contract terms and yet no-one need prove we have any qualifications or Licenses to successfully run these businesses as the owners of these companies.
Now…one may say that as part of our capitalist society our economies need people to ‘take the plunge’ and start businesses to create employment opportunities and produce the goods and services our societies need or crave. I for one am not denying this important point.
Considering the huge role and responsibility business has to successfully grow our economies it does seem a little crazy that anyone wanting to start their own business can simply do so by just starting to trade as a Business. It can be that simple to start a business…yet is business that simple?
Success in business: ‘2’ Failure in Business: ‘8’
Just take a look at some of the statistics for success in business, or should that be failure in business? You may have heard that 80% of businesses are no longer in business after their first 18 months to 5 years. An Article on Forbes further verifies these s.tats That is a huge toll on our communities, societies and economies. Surely there is a better way to improve these numbers.
I have coached over 300 businesses since 2001 and apart from the occasional ‘acts of god’ – serious diseases, deaths or other outside factors such as divorce, none of the clients I have coached have had to close their business. So is the 80% failure rate something we can change?
‘L’-Plates is key to success in business…
Universities and other educational institutions all recognise the importance of studying business and its many subsets. These institutions offer certificates, Diplomas, Degrees, Masters and Doctorates in many of these fields.
Many of the fields of business are recognised in their own right as specialist fields and although many are technically not a science that always offers a specified outcome every time when the same conditions are repeated. It is important to ‘L’earn and know how to measure, test , report as well as manage and lead business to achieve the best possible outcome.
One does not necessarily need to go to any of these institutions to be a success in business. However, to greatly improve our chance of success in business we should all ‘L’earn more to earn more’, by reading books, articles, listening to sudios or podcasts and attending seminars or other business events.
Develop a business dashboard to review your success in business…
It would be fair to say that every business wants one main thing and that is ‘systematic consistency’ of results – normally in the form of enhanced profits, yet this is not always the primary objective.
In order for a business to achieve ‘systematic consistency’ it has to develop and apply systems within the business that when applied under specified terms and conditions will offer a predetermined outcome within a specific range that is acceptable for that business.
This can be achieved by business simply developing and applying strategies and testing and measuring the results to determine if they want to repeat these strategies, improve them or stop this strategy and test something different. It’s not Rocket Science, yet it is a science that needs to be applied daily within a business.
Testing, Measuring & Reporting your numbers is a smart use of your time!
To be able to ‘Test, Measure and Report’ the implementation of strategies, business owners and team members need to allocate time to actually review these results and adjust accordingly to successfully ‘work on’ the business as opposed to just ‘working in’ the business every day.
Measuring, testing and reporting your business results takes discipline, focus, certain systems to be put in place and a certain amount of skill to use these systems effectively. Often even Business Owners whom are qualified with business degrees or better, overlook the need to measure test and report some aspects of their business because they just get too busy ‘working in’ the business.
Regardless as to whether you have a business qualification or not, we all can get busy in business and distracted from the most important areas of measuring, testing and reporting our business results to help us work smarter and not harder to enhance our success in business. Yet it is this ‘measuring, testing and reporting process that will set the ‘rythym and pace’ of your business and how well you can adjust to circumstances when needed to create the success in business we desire and need.
Having a Business Coach is a great way to ensure you invest some of your time each day/week ‘working on’ your business and review the results from the strategies you are implementing. Don’t take my word for it, just take a look at dozens of business coaching success stories on our Libabun website ‘Success Stories’ for examples of this for businesses of all shape and sizes.
If the science of ‘testing, measuring and reporting’ is all that you do in your business, so you have access to the results in ‘real time’ to make informed decisions, this will vastly improve your situation to correctly keep doing the strategies that work and ‘axe’ the business strategies that don’t work. If you do this consistently then your are optimising your chances of success in business.
Adopting these principles takes discipline, education and determination to systemise these so it becomes a daily behaviour for you as a business owner. It’s not Rocket Science, but if you do this consistently you will soon find your success in business ‘rocketing’ towards the achievement of your goals.