You don’t want those!
You want CASH and CHOICES! Growth and profits help the business to fulfil your personal objectives. You didn’t start the business so that you could have thousands of employees, and earn millions of pounds. You started is that you could have the freedom to do that kind of work you like, be your own boss, take holidays or pursue outside interests when you like, and have the cash available to do so, and even into your retirement.
But it’s not always how you end up, is it? Overworked, stressed, needing help but not knowing what, and struggling to get a week in Majorca let alone anything more exotic.
Most business advisory tools are used to drive growth in profits. But without a clear understanding of what YOU want, that only does half the job. You need to be clear about your goals, and by that I mean personal goals.
Driving growth and profits up is a means to an end, not an end in itself. It still needs to be done, and that’s what we do best here. But we are know why.
Because other key thing that we try and build in is choice. You can choose to take four weeks off or you can choose to work. Sometimes – most of the time these days – you can’t choose. You have to work. But if we can build in the choices then the work becomes easier, stress levels drop, and who knows – you make it for your four weeks off.
It’s essential to plan personal goals as well as business ones. Just doing the business ones is just doing half the job.
Tuesday, 7 July 2009
Friday, 3 July 2009
Do the maths!
People have some number blindness particularly when they’re trying to be positive. I come across this all the time, and in particular, in this recession, people are keen to feel good about their jobs and their houses. So they forget what the numbers really mean – particularly percentages.
If your house has dropped by 50% in value, and then goes up by 50%, it doesn’t go up to the same level it was at the start. Let’s do the sums.
Price year one £100,000
50% price fall -£50,000
Price at the beginning of year two £50,000
50% price rise £25,000
Price at the end of year two £75,000
Do you see how percentages can mislead us? And oh how we are being misled at the moment!
The government told us that the economy’s performance in the first quarter of this year showed a 1.9% drop. Now that has been revised to 2.4% drop. I wonder if more revisions are coming. That’s 4.9% in the 12 months by the way. The largest deficit since official records began just after the war. They didn’t offer us this fact – you had to go look yourself.
Let’s look at the USA for a moment. Employment numbers last month showed a better than expected drop. This wasn’t though a genuine improvement, but new and improved techniques for recording the numbers. More adjustments for seasonal adjustments and birth and death models were built in. The discouraged workers – those who have given up looking – were not included in the jobless figures at all, for the first time. Without all these shenanigans, the figures would have shown unemployment getting worse at the same pace as last year. If the authorities were measuring on the same basis as in the 1930s, then they will be showing similar levels as those in the Great Depression – about 20% of the workforce. But we can’t tell people that can we?
My message is simple – check the numbers and question the basis.
Now here’s the entertainment – Warren Buffett’s response to an enquiry about when the positive effects of the US government stimulus package will be seen “ We’ll see the benefits eventually but not yet. You can’t make a baby in a month by getting nine women pregnant”.
But the one I really like comes from Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary “ the UK needs a new government because they are a group of witless, hopeless Scots whose solution to the recession is to tax your way out of it. If that was the answer, Ted Heath would have an elected to six successive terms.”
Question – assuming that the government is going to lose the next election, are they setting up the next administration to fail so they get back in five years time? Of course, that implies that we are paying for this.
If your house has dropped by 50% in value, and then goes up by 50%, it doesn’t go up to the same level it was at the start. Let’s do the sums.
Price year one £100,000
50% price fall -£50,000
Price at the beginning of year two £50,000
50% price rise £25,000
Price at the end of year two £75,000
Do you see how percentages can mislead us? And oh how we are being misled at the moment!
The government told us that the economy’s performance in the first quarter of this year showed a 1.9% drop. Now that has been revised to 2.4% drop. I wonder if more revisions are coming. That’s 4.9% in the 12 months by the way. The largest deficit since official records began just after the war. They didn’t offer us this fact – you had to go look yourself.
Let’s look at the USA for a moment. Employment numbers last month showed a better than expected drop. This wasn’t though a genuine improvement, but new and improved techniques for recording the numbers. More adjustments for seasonal adjustments and birth and death models were built in. The discouraged workers – those who have given up looking – were not included in the jobless figures at all, for the first time. Without all these shenanigans, the figures would have shown unemployment getting worse at the same pace as last year. If the authorities were measuring on the same basis as in the 1930s, then they will be showing similar levels as those in the Great Depression – about 20% of the workforce. But we can’t tell people that can we?
My message is simple – check the numbers and question the basis.
Now here’s the entertainment – Warren Buffett’s response to an enquiry about when the positive effects of the US government stimulus package will be seen “ We’ll see the benefits eventually but not yet. You can’t make a baby in a month by getting nine women pregnant”.
But the one I really like comes from Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary “ the UK needs a new government because they are a group of witless, hopeless Scots whose solution to the recession is to tax your way out of it. If that was the answer, Ted Heath would have an elected to six successive terms.”
Question – assuming that the government is going to lose the next election, are they setting up the next administration to fail so they get back in five years time? Of course, that implies that we are paying for this.
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