Slow Death

The Accountants are slowly strangling and stifflling the life out of UKplc. Now let us get this straight from the outset. You have to make a profit to survive in business, no question. In hard times you have to work your business hard, cut out waste, improve efficiency, make sure you are as productive and effective as you can be. Run a lean mean machine, no problems. There is however a switch over point. When you run your business with the aim to make a better profit, achieve a percentage increase in market share, to improve your shareholding status or whatever of the many and varied slices the Accountants use to 'judge' the financial success of a business by. You have crossed the line.

The first and only criteria to be in business is to provide what you do to the best of your ability and to the customers satisfaction. Once you lose that motivation you have sold out any solid morale justification and thereby squandered your rights to be in business. No matter how much hype and smooth sounding customer focussed mission statements you come up with you have lost that vital contract. Your personal contract to provide the best. This is where UKplc is now finding itself. Whether we are talking the corner shop, a long-standing family firm, a national or international producer or supplier. The Accountants have their claw around them all. We have grown to expect short-term solutions to be the sole inspiration, another percentage point here or there in profits or growth. Entirely losing sight of the long-term goal of keeping your existing customers happy and wanting them to come back, again and again and telling all their friends to join in. This is real growth, this is real vitality and this is the only measure of survival.

If your priority of attention is to squeeze another percentage point of profit out of your business, the end figures may look very impressive, with lots of noughts, but along the way you have had to sacrifice. The sacrifice might be one or some of many things, quality, supplier relationships, staffing morale, reject standards, returns handling, future investment, plant upgrades, transaction delays, support, or a whole host of other such issues. A host with one thing in common they directly impinge on what you supply and your customers satisfaction in receiving what you offer. A host that might add a small percentage in your costs and that can look large in the balance sheet. They can make major contributions to achieving quality, but quality is not a balance sheet account. So any of these minor irritants that you have given ground on have set off a time-fuse. Your criteria for quality has become compromised. A fuse that will, over time, gradually eat away at customer satisfaction and confidence. By then your business will be in terminal decline and your helpful Accountant, that helped you make more profits, will have slipped away to a better and more promising punter.


Once you give ground on being the sole arbiter on what you are offering and it becomes subject to others value-engineering assessments then you are in the mire. Savings are always easy to offer but retaining the standards you set for yourself are a daily nightmare battle only you can make. 

This is where this blog wants us to all stop and think. As we too are the Chief Executives of our own business. How we put ourselves out and about is our business and we need to be clear in our minds the standards we set ourselves to achieve. Not to be seduced by tempting offers to buy more, buy cheaper, buy easier but to keep on taking ourselves to task for not quite attaining that quality standard we know is right for us.

So look around, be alert, questioning and challenging on whose products you bring into your life. Keep your life account in balance but strive within that limitation to make the quality happen on a daily basis that you know is right for you.