In any business there is a core of important numbers. Knowing these numbers will give you more than 80% of the information you need to successfully navigate your ship of enterprise [otherwise known as a small business]. The most important numbers are the imaginary ones! These are the numbers you make up in your head when you're enjoying a relaxing beer at the Keg on a Wednesday late afternoon. These imaginary numbers are the numbers you'd like to achieve in the next year or so. People who know much more about business than me would call these numbers goals, and if you bothered to write them down then they might even be called budgets!

Once you have a vague idea of the numbers you'd like to aim for you can start working out how your business is going to get there. The formal business educators call this planning, but I call this time for another beer.

We take this business thing way too seriously, so take off your tie and lets look at the little oaks guide to getting what we want out of our business. You will need a piece of paper - probably not much larger than the back of a cigarette box. A pen would also be nice to immortalize these transient dreams. And, of course, a flagon of beer to lubricate the process. Any beer will do although I personally have had the most success with Foresters Draft. [Something to do with the endangered Knysna sea horse in the lagoon water, Nedbank assures me.]

Here is the simple process towards getting what you want out of your business.

1. Ask yourself what you want! Not much point in continuing until you've dreamed up a few numbers! If you can't do this, then chances are that the business will drift a little like flotsam on the tides of business circumstance. No science here folk - just dream up a number and write it down.

2. Ask yourself if that's enough! If this number isn't going to pay your own bills then you're either aiming too low, or this isn't the business for you. Go back to step 1 and try again.

3. Find the important numbers you need to keep in focus to fulfill the dream in step 1. These are usually Sales, Cost of Sales, and Other Costs. [Other Costs include staff, banking, communications, transport, technology, etc.]

4. Now it's all downhill. Get another beer and look at the 5 most effective things you can do to increase Sales, the 5 most effective things you can do to reduce Cost of Sales, and the 5 most effective things you can do to reduce Other Costs.

5. Write all of this down and then get another beer because you've just earned your annual salary. You've just done the most important thing a business owner can do - actually guiding your ship of enterprise through these turbulent waters.

6. This was so liberating maybe we should do it again next Wednesday. This business game is fun, isn't it?

In a marginally more serious vein, most of us don't have a formal business plan [about two thirds of all seminar delegates] and as a result we drift from crisis to crisis. That's both stressful and expensive. The formal planning process can get awfully complex if we listen to the experts, so why not try the above tested method? Not only will you gain new insight into your business, but you will enjoy it so much that you will want to do it again and again. Where in the lexicon of life does it say that beer and business are incompatible?

About removing your tie before doing this: I find we take money way too seriously when we wear a tie, but more importantly, it has a nasty habit of ending up in the beer!

© Peter Carruthers, www.petesweekly.co.za

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