There are two basic things that will destroy any business, technically they will destroy your personal finances as well.
Although the list is small, over 90% of all businesses fail because of one or both of these.
When it’s such a short list why do so many business owners allow themselves to fail?
That’s a really good question which I would answer with another question.
Why do so many idiots in government think that socialism will work?
It’s never worked, in any scenario, ever.
That’s like saying I’ll just control my heroin use.
You can’t control heroin usage and you can’t break the laws of acquiring wealth and think somehow it will work this time.
It never works.
But, if you obey the laws of accumulating wealth and be sure that you eliminate the two destroyers of all financial prosperity, you can have the business and the life you’ve always dreamed of.
So what are the two destroyers Dave?
- Not enough profitable sales.
- Too much debt.
A business needs a constant stream of profit. The larger the business the more new customers that need to be acquired and selling to existing customers over and over again becomes a staple of success.
The same holds true for your personal finances.
If you are struggling financially you simply need more income.
So whether you are in business or you work for someone else, increasing your income has to be a massive focus in your life.
Besides your church and family, your income needs to be something that requires a lot of your attention until you get it to where it needs to be.
You decide where it needs to be.
If you are in business you must learn to get new customers.
It needs to become the back bone of your business.
It needs to be priority number 1.
Your personal finances are no different.
You must learn to earn more money and stop making excuses.
I’ve heard them all, I don’t care about money, money isn’t my god, money is the root of all evil and on and on.
Money is neutral, it is something we exchange for other things we need and want.
Getting more of it is easy if you follow simple rules and work at it to learn about how to get more of it and how to keep it.
You don’t have to be filthy rich to relax a little but you do need to make it a priority to learn it’s laws.
The second half of the equation is too much debt. Nothing will sink a company quicker than too much debt.
Debt can sink any business regardless of the amount of new customers they have.
Debt is the curse of the past 4 generations.
The curse is believing we can have something long before we can actually afford it.
American consumers finance houses, cars, boats, motorcycles, furniture, clothes, perfume, tv’s stereos and the list goes on and on.
Business owners are just as bad.
They finance desks, phones, printing equipment, vehicles, buildings, maintenance, manufacturing equipment, and the list goes on and on.
Unfortunately I learned this lesson the hard way.
Having built a successful manufacturing company that over a 18 year period of time had retail sales worldwide in excess of a 100 million dollars, but too much debt forced it into chapter 11.
The problem wasn’t having income, we had lots of new customers on a regular basis but the debt load I had created became impossible to manage.
So a few years back I got to start over, not by choice but by bad decisions.
They say wisdom comes from experience and experience comes from bad decisions.
I have to agree.
If you want to prosper you need to understand there are two types of debt.
Good debt and bad debt.
Bad debt is easy to define, it costs you money and in return you have an item that is depreciating in value faster than the debt is going down.
Good debt on the other hand is debt that brings income.
If you make money in a truck, it’s ok to have debt on a truck but you don’t need the F250 Platinum to do so.
Buy the Platinum when you can pay cash for it.
I don’t care if it came with zero percent financing, debt is a killer and if you want to fix your finances, you have to see the difference between needs and wants.
If something makes you a substantial amount of money above what you owe, that is considered good debt.
Real estate investing, which by the way saved my wife and I when my other business tanked, is one of those investments that is considered good debt.
There is so much information out there about real estate investing that I firmly believe anyone can learn to do it without any money or credit, so there is really no excuse.
The beauty of putting 100% of your focus on these two items is that once you eliminate the debt your focus is left on one item of focus, income producing activities.
Look, delayed gratification is not waiting until you have the money to purchase something, it is not purchasing the item even though you have the money to purchase it.
The late PT Barnum, wrote in his book The Art Of Money Getting, The possession of a perfect knowledge of your business is an absolute necessity in order to insure success.
The number one way I know of to eliminate debt is to increase income and use some of the increase to eliminate all debt.
It’s really surprising how quickly you can turn a business around if you are willing to commit to obeying these two laws.
I help business owners, mostly in the electrical world, to increase their income.
Why mostly in the electrical world?
Because it’s an industry I’ve been in for the past 20 years, I know it very well but more importantly because 90% of electrical contractors will end up failing.
Those are some pretty ugly stats.
It’s my duty to make sure I help as many of you as possible.
I know there are lots of people making money right now because the economy is booming but nothing lasts forever and the casualties will be many.
A slowdown is always lurking around the next bend.
Robert Kiyosaki says that when you see cranes everywhere it won’t be long.
Have you looked around lately?
I often ask myself, where is all of this money coming from?
Oh yeah, they borrow it.
Look if you are concerned about your business and know you need more customers, I can help but you have to take the first step.
I have a live webinar where I will show you what you can do to be sure you won’t end up a statistic. Click here to sign up now.
To your lifelong prosperity,
David Mulvaney