So before we get to far along in this module, you might be asking yourself depending on here you live where you work, and depending on what type of business you work for or what type of business you're attempting to start how is it that you define success? For example, some of you may be forced in to, for lack of a better word a small business career because you are living in a place, where secure, established business employment positions don't exist or are very difficult to obtain. Certainly that exists in, in many parts of the world, including here in the United States. We find some people who start businesses out of necessity. So they may start a small retail shop or they may small, start a small restaurant, or a small shoe shine business for example. Or a small hair salon or, or wedding preparation business and, and I could probably keep going. Many people start businesses out of their home and a lot of people do that out of necess, necessity and so, their definition of success might be simply surviving. Surviving literally and, and providing for their family and their livelihood, but also the business continuing to exist, surviving. Other people start businesses perhaps not 100% out of necessity but because of a lifestyle choice. They, they want to be their own boss. And so they start a small restaurant. They don't expect it to become the next McDonalds chain or KFC, the next worldwide growth success story. But simply they want to provide a living for their family and they want to have a good lifestyle, and so they're not making decisions necessarily to to grow the business. Other people start businesses and that is their stated goal, to take over a market or sector or industry. To be very successful to, to expand and grow and gain market share. And so there are a lot of ways that, that we probably could look at this, this question. And, and none of those is incorrect, so if, if you're in, in a different one of those categories than I refer to, it doesn't mean that, that, that your approach is, is not the right one. But I think it's probably safe to say that most businesses do not exist in order to lose money. Now there may be exceptions, and we probably don't even need to waste time on that to that, to that rule. But most people who start a business do not do it hoping that they end up with less money than when they started. Most people in business expect and hope to turn a profit. Meaning simply that the expenses, or what they spend on inputs and other supplies and labor and interest if they have debt, is less than what they collect in revenues. Not many businesses hope to lose money have fewer revenues than they do expenses. And so I think if we take that as our answer, what we're trying to explain, how is it that you can start and, and grow or maintain a profitable business? I think that we'll have the, the easiest time answering this question throughout the course. There are a lot of other ways we could try to measure success or try to explain. We could try to say market share we could measure success by that. We could say specific ratios like net income to sales, or some other accounting definition of profit, and, and all of those are valid and useful. Sometimes businesses are publicly traded and people can buy and sell their shares on the stock market. So sometimes it's it's stock market price that, that seems to be the most important measure of success. We're going to use the simple definition of profits it's not that we, we ignore other measures. But it's just for simplicity's sake to try to get our hands around understanding this key question. Before we finish this part of the, of the module one of this course, I want to tackle something that you may not have asked yourself, and that is, why should you care about this question? Some of you may not be in a position in your business if you really feel like you have an influence on making a difference in the profitability of the company. Some of you work for non-profit organizations, and, and might be saying well how do you measure success in our sector? And, and that's another discussion for another day. Certainly there are a lot of books written on that. For example, if you work in a school or a hospital. And so I, I recognize all, all of those realities but the question as we framed it, business success, how to achieve it? Why should you care if you're in any of these situations where you may not be playing a role, or, or may not be in a position yet where you have a great influence? Why should you care? Here are several reasons that you maybe might consider caring, if you, if you're not already persuaded. One would be that all of us live in societies where businesses exist. And to some degree we may have retirement savings, or we may have pensions, or federal or government savings for us that are based in business continuing to grow and succeed. So perhaps if you're focused on web design for your business, you don't feel like that you, you're going to have a great influence on, on the ultimate success of the business. Well as an investor you probably still should care about this because you want to invest in companies or have a stake in companies that succeed. That's, that's one reason, to, to start out. Another reason would be some of you may not be in a position right now to start your own business, but in the future you may have goals and dreams of doing so. And so even though right now you might be again, the web designer for your business and may not feel like you have the most direct influence on the overall business's success you may in the future have that influence. If you aren't running your own business but working for someone else, you may end up having a position in the future where you are in a general manager role, and you do have more influence than you do now for the business's overall success. And so those are just a few reasons you might consider caring more than, than you might have first considered about this about this important question. So we're going to focus on profit, profitability throughout this entire course and that'll be our measure. In the next part, we'll try to get a little bit better handle on what potential answers to the question, what leads to business success or business prof, profitability or survivability? And we'll, we'll do that in a systematic way that I hope makes sense to you.
