7 Basic Facts of Business Life for Focus in Growing Your Own

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7 Basic Facts of Business Life for Focus in Growing Your Own

By Martin Zwilling | Inc Magazine | September 29, 2024

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According to the author when he started mentoring aspiring founders and small businesses a few years ago, he anticipated that he would get mostly tough technology questions, but instead, he more often hears things like “Where do I start?”  A wealth of books are available to address the basic facts of business life, like the classic by Bill McBean — aptly named The Facts of Business Life — based on his 40 years’ experience running large and small businesses. Bill does a great job of outlining the key realities as follows:

1. If you don’t lead, no one will follow. Good business leadership begins with defining both the direction and the destination of your company. That’s where you start. From there, you need to hone a whole set of skills to survive and prosper, including effective communication, leadership under pressure, and constant adaptation to change.
2. If you don’t control it, you don’t own it. Control in business requires teamwork, which occurs in successful companies when team members, products, and processes work in unison. You have to define the key tasks that must be handled every day and institute the proper controls to make sure they happen effectively and consistently.
3. Protecting your company’s assets must be your first priority. Assets include the required equipment, accounts receivable, and cash. Maybe more importantly, your long-term survivability is tied to intellectual property, like trade secrets and patents, as well as other less tangible items like your customer base, your experience, and your skills.
4. Planning is about preparing for the future, not predicting it. Planning is not just an early-stage activity, it must be an ongoing activity, based on current and accurate information as well as educated guesses on future changes. Planning should keep you focused on what’s important and prepare you for what lies ahead.
5. If you don’t market your business, you won’t have one. Marketing and advertising are business realities. Word-of-mouth and viral are not long-term solutions. It doesn’t matter how good your product or service is if most of your potential customers don’t know about it. With 4 million new websites per day, customers won’t find you by accident.
6. The marketplace is a war zone. Every company has competitors or there is no market for what you offer. Successful entrepreneurs know they have to fight not only to win market share, but to retain it as well. Past success is no guarantee of future success, and the only way to remain successful is to maintain a fighting mentality.
7. You don’t just have to know the business you’re in, you have to know business. Understanding one’s industry is necessary but not sufficient to be successful. Many businesses fail simply because they ignore or do poorly in one or more of the basic aspects of every business, like accounting, finance, personnel, or business law.

2 key takeaways from the article

1. According to the author when he started mentoring aspiring founders and small businesses a few years ago, he anticipated that he would get mostly tough technology questions, but instead, he more often hears things like “Where do I start?”  
2. A wealth of books are available to address the basic facts of business life, like the classic by Bill McBean — aptly named The Facts of Business Life — based on his 40 years’ experience running large and small businesses. Bill does a great job of outlining the key realities as follows: if you don’t lead, no one will follow; protecting your company’s assets must be your first priority; planning is about preparing for the future, not predicting it; if you don’t market your business, you won’t have one; The marketplace is a war zone; and you don’t just have to know the business you’re in, you have to know business.

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Topics:  Startups, Entrepreneurship, Starting a business, Leadership, Failure