The Facts of Business Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

company’s first priority should be sales, profits, and growth. But while sales, profits, and growth are important, it is equally if not more important to focus on protecting your assets because they power your sales, profits, and growth. Assets include equipment, accounts receivables, cash, and all the other items on your business’s balance sheet. But there are other assets on which you can’t put a dollar value, like your skills and experience; your employees and their skills and experience; the company’s processes, customer base, and reputation; and others. And even though these assets do not appear on any balance sheet, they all have value and should accordingly be treated as if they had a cash value. And this means you must do whatever has to be done to manage and protect them.
    For example, in order to build and maintain a company’s customer base, you have to focus on developing processes for keeping existing customers as well as training employees to find new ones. If, however, you concentrate on finding new customers at the expense of providing after-sales service to existing ones, it’s likely that those existing customers will go elsewhere. Protecting and managing a company’s assets is one of the most underappreciated business issues today and, if mismanaged, can be one of the most damaging ones. But if you understand what all of a company’s assets are, and that they all have to be protected, you are much more likely to see your company not only survive but succeed.
Fact 4: Planning Is About Preparing for the Future, Not Predicting It
    Nobody knows what the future will bring, but you can make educated guesses based on the most current, accurate information available as well as your own past experiences. That means gathering and making use of such information as past sales, expenses, and profit results; the size of the market; and competition and customer demographics, just to name a few. Doing so enables you to look into the future and start anticipating what opportunities or threats may present themselves, as well as to make sure that you have whatever is needed to prepare for them. Although people frequently think planning is limited largely to the early stages of a business, it’s actually an ongoing activity, or at least it should be.
    It’s important to remember, too, that planning is both a science and an art. The science is in gathering pertinent information, and the art is in taking that information and turning it into a plan that will move the business from “here to there” over a specific time period. In fact, being able to plan better than one’s competitors is such an important skill that it can provide a company with a competitive advantage in the marketplace. If, for example, an owner knows there is a new product coming on the market and proactively plans for it ahead of time, he or she can “own the market” before the company’s less aggressive competitors are even thinking about it. This is similar to something the Ford Motor Company did in 2008 and 2009 when careful planning enabled it to see the coming restriction on bank lending. Being proactive, they were able to raise capital before the tightening of lending regulations, which their competitors, General Motors and Chrysler, did not. And because Ford’s management “read the tea leaves,” unlike GM and Chrysler, their company didn’t run out of cash and need a government bailout. They knew, as you should, that planning is important because it focuses owners on what’s important and prepares them for what lies ahead.
Fact 5: If You Don’t Market Your Business, You Won’t Have One
    Marketing and advertising are business realities. Without marketing and advertising there are few sales, and without sales there is no company. If you can’t or don’t want to work to market whatever product or service the company is going to provide, you should