Small business

Business is product.

Business is product.

What does that mean though? First and foremost, it means that business is not ideas because ideas without action is not product. Ideas alone are simple mental masturbation and until they are written down or acted upon they have no physical form, no point. They cannot be product. Ideas can become product if they are patented, copyrighted or otherwise written down and protected legally, but then they are no longer simply ideas.

The greatest idea in the world won’t matter if it’s not acted upon.

Business is product.

What else could this mean? Well, it must also mean that the idea created is sold. Why? Because to be a product, someone needs to buy it. An object that is not sold or purchased is simply a rock, a oddity, perhaps even a piece of eccentric art (albeit, I’m sure someone could debate that art itself is not art unless someone other than the artist recognizes it as such, perhaps by purchasing it.)

Again, the greatest idea in the world made material is not business if no one wants it. You can make a machine that in 50 years will change the world, but if no one now understands it or can use it, it’s not a business. It is not a product.

Business is product.

Now here is where I start to split hairs. Product isn’t just a sale. It’s enough sales that the product can be manufactured as more than a one off. This doesn’t mean that business cannot be an art business, it means that the product in an art business is the artist herself, not the art. The purchasers who support it are buying her output, not her individual pieces. In the end, she’s the product.

In a similar fashion, a great idea, made material, and sold to one person, cannot be a product. It is a prototype, a trifle, an artifact, however it is not a product, it is not business.

When you create a business, the hardest thing to come to terms with as an academic or someone just coming out of school is that business is product. You need to not only have a great idea that you can execute on, but you need to be able to sell it, and not just once, but repeatedly, to many people. Create a product that may not last the ages, but will last long enough to pay the bills and help materialize the next product.

Business is product. Plain and simple.

Now go and build it.

KJR

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Dreaming of *redacted by government order* things

So, I see the stories about a bunch of billionaires seriously considering an asteroid mining venture and it always gets me wondering. They are dead-on correct that with great risk investment comes great reward. If they can find and harvest a ore-rich asteroid, the ROI could be astronomical. They inherently avoid all of the regulation down here, and own the entire asteroid so there wouldn’t be any crown taxes or the like on the goods.

However, at the same time, my mind wanders to missed opportunities we have here on Earth all the time. The ROI on investments in infrastructure is never immediately apparent to anyone. However, without all of the high-speed internet lines we have around the world, the entire industry upon which Google’s billionaires and Amazon’s billionaires, and even arguably Apple’s billionaires come from, would not exist.

Without the heavy government investment (including debt) in our interstate/transcontinental highway system, I’d argue a full 70-90% of modern commerce really wouldn’t exist. Yet that commerce essentially paid off the debt and now we are simply dealing with keeping everything balanced.

Now though, it seems that government isn’t allowed to make massive infrastructure investments, even though it is fully permitted to make massive regulatory investments — creating entire regulatory structures that need to be paid for in the long run to tell other businesses how to work and then ensure they are following those rules.

Regulatory structures, in almost all cases, only create work for the government. There may be a few small businesses that form (mostly lawyers and accountants) to help other businesses around it, but in the end it doesn’t create the massive booms of growth you see with infrastructure investment. If the government spent the money it should to properly expand Toronto’s (or any other major city’s) public transit system, you would see the payoff almost immediately in available jobs for people and less expense on road maintenance and costs.

Yet, for some reason we cannot seem to do that anymore.

Instead, we have Harper arguing over whether a fetus is a living thing, and if he has his way, creating even more regulation to tell us how to live without making our lives any better and McGuinty trying to come up with some other way to regulate our businesses without adding any value to them. Both sides are chasing up the tree of not working for us, but telling us how we should live.

And worse! The one elected politicianI can see who doesn’t seem to be immediately trying to tell us how we should live has the social skills of a cucumber and, honestly, even I really dislike him.

*sigh*

I have no problem with taxes when I can see that they are going towards things that will make it easier for me to produce value for my clients. I have no problem with taxes when I can see that they are building a future Canada we can all love and respect.

I do have problem with taxes when I can see they are going down a black hole and, even worse, when I can see they are being used to make it even more difficult for a small business to survive and produce value for its community.

We need a party or a politician or someone who can stand up and say government can do good for society, but it needs to stop telling us how to live and start helping us live better. Until then, it’s just all such a waste of time. I may as well try to get my money in with the asteroid miners.

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