Herman School of Business
What are these gages for?
When life throws you softballs right down the middle no one needs a coach to tell them what to do. Wham, you swing that long and slow swing and the ball blasts out over the fence for another home run. But I am trying to constantly guard you against the reality of life…you don’t always win and you don’t always get a fat slow pitch to hit.
Let’s go back to pilot training again. Someplace where we often find ourselves, as there were many lessons learned there about losing and winning. Lose there and you could lose you your life. It motivated you to listen.
When the warning lights go off on the dashboard panel in an airplane you notice those little hairs on the back of your neck prick up. Warning lights and buzzers go off in your business but since you probably won’t die you ignore them. Huge mistake. In the airplane you 1) assess the situation immediately, 2) take proper action to control the situation, and 3) land as soon as possible. There is no gray area if you want to live every time a problem occurs in an airplane. The stakes are too high to ignore the lights and buzzers going off.
If you are not in control of your business at all times…which means knowing every gage on that dashboard and what those lights and buzzers mean, you may crash before you ever regain control when something goes wrong. Know your money figures at all times. And when a warning hits, short on payroll, can’t pay the bills this week, or sales seem lower than they should be, then you better immediately identify that situation, take a necessary step to correct it, and recognize that if you can’t land safely from it…bail out like any pilot would before crashing to mother earth.
Listen. No pilot bails out prematurely, because landing in the plane and walking away beats the shock of hurtling out of the cockpit and spinning around under a parachute down to who knows what. But a pilot wastes no time in recognizing danger and acting to minimize the consequences. Business owners can do that only if they are constantly reading the gages. Knowing how much fuel, what your altitude is, and so on, is simply the same as knowing cash positions, debt issues, sales figures and customer traffic flow.
How some of you “fly” a business without ever looking at the numbers astounds me…yet I saw it hundreds of times over the last thirty years.
- Posted: 4 December 2007
- Comments: 0
- Category: Running a business
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