Business Management Styles

Most businesses are managing to

  • Remove the pain,
  • “Live within the budget” (and the budget was determined either by “the economy”, “the market”, or “who walks through the door.”
  • Pay this month’s bills

This is the “scarcity” side of management. We assume that there isn’t enough to go around, so we are constantly trying to make do.

For the most part most of us have always believed that the harder we work the better things will be. However, let’s look at what happens when we accomplish those three things we were managing above.

  • Remove the pain – would result in “painless.” Certainly desirable, we would be OK if we removed the pain, right?
  • Live within the budget – Let’s see in this case the budget was determined by someone else, or something else, the economy, the market, or who walked through the door. We aren’t exactly in control here are we? What would happen, however, if we hit “this budget”? We’d be, sort of OK, but not sure.
  • Pay this month’s bill-that certainly would be OK, but it doesn’t generate anything more than the budget. We’re still, just OK.

Are you getting the point here? When we manage this way, at best we will be OK, so-so, average…maybe, when we achieved our goals. Nothing spectacular happening here.

What happens when we manage to find the opportunities, the multipliers, or from a place of abundance? Instead of managing to avoid the pain, or to live within what is dealt to us, we start looking for the opportunities that will multiply the number of customers walking through the door, the number of them we sell, multiply the dollars spent by our average customer, finding customers that can and will spend more, finding ways that will encourage customers to spend more. I’ve seen companies jump 10 times in a week when changing to this perspective….no kidding!

Let’s step back a little from this and review.

  • We can manage on the scarcity side, and the results will always be OK, average, acceptable.
  • Or we can manage from abundance, always looking for ways to leap forward, grow a business and finding the multipliers in everything we manage.

Most business owners manage their business from the scarcity side.. How do I pay this month’s bills? Cutting something to have cash, or to hit the budget, but the bottom line result is that you cut something that would have generated more cash than it cost you. That almost always puts you into a downward spiral.

But if we are going to manage for incredible results and huge growth, we have to manage from both sides. We’ll remove the pain alright, but we always have to look to find the opportunities…where we should be investing that will create the greatest opportunity.

The business that operates from scarcity, cuts a cost without regard for what multiplier it impacted usually put the company into a downward spiral. Where if we manage to find the multiplier we’ll find where a $1 spent would generate $100 or $1,000. We’ll probably also find $1 generating only $5 somewhere. That’s an opportunity too…we’ll move the money from the 5 times multiplier to the 100 to 1,000 multiplier and watch our business leap forward.