Some 20 years ago I went to a seminar on business development and strategies for business growth. At that seminar I picked up one really critical principle – the principle known as the Pareto Principle or the 80/20 rule.
I subsequently purchased a book written by Richard Koch called “The 80/20 Principle” which provided a wonderful insight into this principle.
Simply put, the 80/20 rule asserts that the minority causes, inputs or effort usually lead to majority of your results, outputs or rewards. To put it another way, 80% of what you achieve comes from 20% of your effort – for all practical purposes, the dominant part of your effort is relatively irrelevant. This is totally contrary to what people normally expect.
So what does imbalance between effort and result mean? Essentially:
What in general does this mean:
In Business
In Society
In the Home
Have a good look at your life and business – I’m sure you will find that the principle will be well and truly alive. Being aware of this can enable you to reprioritise the things in your life and business to produce maximum results for minimum input!
Now the purpose of my introducing this principle to you is in support of a statement that I’m going to make – it’s a hunch, but a pretty informed one at that!
80% of businesses are at best making basic wages for their owners. There you are, I’ve said it. In fact, I’ll go one step further and say that 80% of those business owners are earning less than their best paid employee. That’s a big statement I know, but a sad fact.
Now many will say that times are tough – and yes, there is no doubt that they are! However, my answer to that is that even in good times, 80% of business owners were still making wages at best. And that’s not good enough for the capital invested in a business.
Now, I have one more controversial statement to make – of the 20% of businesses that were making a profit greater than a basic wage for their owners, in 80% of cases that was from luck, not any good planning or business strategy. So, let’s now look at what we are left with – 20% of 20% of businesses or 4% of businesses out there are making profits greater than basic wages for their owners from good strategic planning and execution. And I would put forward one further conclusion – and it is a variation from the 80/20 principle – that is I would suggest that these 4% of businesses would account for 80% of business profits in the business community!
Now I see that as a disgrace in that most businesses erode economic value, not create it! How could that be? In the book “E Myth” by Michael Gerber (a must read book for anyone planning to go into business or already in business), Gerber suggests that for a business to be successful, the business owner must have (or buy in) three major skills as follows:
a) Entrepreneurial skills – to identify and seek out opportunities b) Management skills – to manage the business c) Technical skills – to do the work that the business does
I will cover these concepts more in a later blog post. However, the majority of businesses owners go into a business where they are good at the technical work – however, their entrepreneurial and management skills are poor. So even though they are good at what they do, they work hard at the wrong things and their business fails. And by failure, I don’t necessarily mean that they go broke – it just doesn’t meet their expectations and ultimately they decide that working for someone else wasn’t really that bad in the first place.
It’s exactly for this reason that we run seminars and workshops for business owners – to provide them with the skills and tools to improve their ability identify the things they need to do to “work on their business”, not just in it.
Here is a challenge for you in the New Year – it’s time to change. Make the time and effort to attend seminars aimed at improving your business management skills, whether presented by GTP or others. We know that they can make a significant difference to your outlook and business performance. Your first step – email us at email@greentaylor.com.au saying “yes, send me a personal invitation to our next business growth workshop”.
See you there!
