Business 300

<p>Negotiation is as much a part of business ownership as anything else. We're all a part of it. But sometimes we misidentify what negotiation is.</p>

<p>You should know who else is serving your customer and what they're bringing to the table. You should pay attention to your competitors. Awareness of the competitive landscape is basic business literacy. But there's a...

<p>Assumptions are the part of the plan most likely to be wrong. The plan itself is usually logical. If X is true, then Y follows. The owner has thought through the steps. What he hasn't thought through is whether X is...

<p>Growth and cash are inversely related — when one goes up, the other comes down. That's the nature of the trade-off. But knowing the trade-off exists and actually preparing for it are two very different disciplines...

<p>Strategy, at its core, is the act of making a small number of defining choices that render a large number of subsequent choices unnecessary. One clear commitment at the top eliminates hundreds of ambiguous decisions...

<p>Standard operating procedures exist to do something simple: ensure that the work gets done the same way, at the same standard, every time. Writing them is the easy part. But every SOP is being constantly evaluated...

<p>Effort is not the same thing as progress. Outcomes are shaped more by decisions than by effort. Even though you can see someone working late, you can't see the chain of choices that determined whether that late night...

<p>There's a temptation in business to equate complexity with sophistication. The more layers a system has, the more thorough it must be. The more steps in the process, the more professional it looks. The bigger the...

<p>A business grows in proportion to the capacity of the person running it. Your business will not outgrow you. It can't. You're the constraint it organizes itself around. If the business has stalled, the first place to...

<p>A strategy is not a vision or an aspiration. A strategy is not a list of goals pinned to a whiteboard. A strategy is a plan - a concrete description of what you intend to accomplish and how you intend to accomplish...

<p>Maintenance isn't a separate activity from doing business. It is part of doing business. The work of upkeep is as real and essential as the work of production.</p>

<p>If you ask a business owner how his company is doing, he'll almost always give you the same answer: revenue. The number rolls off the tongue because it's the one he knows best, the one he tracks most closely, the one...

<p>Every organization has an emotional climate. Everyone who works there feels it. It's the unspoken rules about what gets said, what gets ignored, and what everyone pretends not to notice. That climate is set by what...

<p>There are employees who are motivated, and those who aren't - employees who care, and those who don't. Usually, business owners leave the motivated employees alone since they're not a problem. And they spend a lot of...

<p>"God will provide" is a comfort when you're facing uncertainty. A reminder that you're not in control, that God is sovereign, and faithful. There's a common misstep when Christians use "God will provide" to justify...