Apart from the obvious, of doing sufficient due diligence on the important detail, such as knowing your nationality, there are many other lessons to be learnt.
Amongst the key ones is the depth of consideration small business owners need to give to the deployment of their very limited financial and operational resources. In most cases, some level of financial and strategic consideration is applied, and trade-offs are always necessary and usually painful. Governments on the other hand are not similarly constrained, spending is welcome, and rewarded, whereas constraint and tough choices are avoided, and there is no bank to refuse an increase in the overdraft.
Those I work with are encouraged to consider their commitments from three buckets:
- What is required to keep the business going, which includes operational and necessary capital expenditure.
- What is required to build the resilience and agility of the current business, enabling it to grow and prosper at the rate, and in the manner necessary to be commercially sustainable.
- What is required to move the business to the ‘next level,’ whatever that may be in the context of their competitive and strategic environment.
Those that give this sort of framework deep consideration generally come out on top.
By contrast, Governments seem to consider their expenditures only in two buckets.
- Sustain operations and get elected. In other words, never take anything away, but find creative ways to rebadge it so that it seem you are always giving.
- Who is entitled to what from the bottomless purse of money to be spent. Joe Hockey when delivering the 2014 budget referred to ‘The end of the age of entitlement’ and look where it got him, and the Abbot government. A bad dose of adversarial short term politics by the opposition, and marketing incompetence by the government ensured that the age of entitlement continues, to this day.
Let’s hope that in this new year we see some common sense and vision emanating from Canberra. A big ask, but after a year of utter and complete chaos, irresponsibility, and self-congratulatory bullshit in 2017, I think we all deserve more.
