As a person who sells advertising, I get to meet small businesses owners. One of the most pertinent mission of these businesses is managing to just keep going, or to be in the game or to not run out of cash.

Most of these businesses also hardly have any resources which they can deploy to actually create a business plan or support a strategy by investing in technology or human resource. In such demanding and challenging times, these businesses solely survive by the will or grace of GOD, or the invisible hand of the market, which manages to keep these businesses afloat in the chaos system they operate.

One of the important lesson I learnt from a ISO consultant when I was in the manufacturing business was “What can be measured, can be improved” which also means that “what is not measured cannot be improved upon“.

As a small business, if you really want to grow and churn in those sales figures, Ask yourself are you really measuring the inputs v/s outputs. Do you measure your sales/marketing efforts diligently? Does it make sense to put use of resources for the sole purpose of measurement, will the cost incurred for measurement purpose give justifiable results?

If the answer is “NO”, then all you need to do is thank GOD every-night, because he made sure, you got food on the table tonight.

Note: The writer is the only person in his business, and doesn’t prefer to measure his efforts and is an atheist.