This one is almost a no-brainer, which is exactly why it catches so many people out. If you own a business, manage one, or lead people in any part of one, you would think you would have a firm handle on your numbers. It is astonishing how many do not.

The questions people cannot answer

Ask a few simple things and watch what happens. What does your product cost? What does it cost to manufacture, and to land, cleared through customs, if it is physical? If it is a technology product, what is the total cost of ownership of your infrastructure? That last one floors most people, because “total cost of ownership” has quietly gone out of fashion.

20 or 30 years ago we had no choice but to know it, because the numbers were astronomical. You bought the hardware, paid to install it, signed a maintenance contract, and budgeted for upgrades and for the things that break. Today most of it is a service, so the cost hides in the small, recurring pieces: a hundred dollars here, a couple of hundred there, a thousand over there. It still adds up to a real total cost of ownership.

Take a basic website. You have a hosting subscription, and you pay someone to build the site. That is where most people stop. They forget that the plugins and the technology need updating, that backups and monitoring have to happen, that someone has to be allocated to watch it. Plenty of businesses have no idea any of this is going on in the background until the shit hits the fan, and then it is “how the hell did that happen?”

My favourite is the app. “I am going to get an app, it will cost me 500 dollars.” Really? It has to run on Android and iOS. It has to stay compatible with several past generations of each operating system, with the current one, with the next, and with the one after that. You have to keep maintaining it, and keep it working with whatever Google and Apple decide to do next. People simply do not think it through.

Do not outsource the knowing

I am labouring the point to show how often people do not know the specifics of their own business. There are standard documents in every business: your profit and loss, your balance sheet, your management report, your budget, and your cash flow. You should be so familiar with them that an investor, your board, your management team, or your line manager can ask you anything and you can answer in an instant.

“That is what I have an accountant for.” Bullshit. You have an accountant and a bookkeeper to take care of the work, and yes, accountants have increasingly moved into an advisory role. But if you carry budget responsibility, if you own the business or lead the department, the knowing is yours. You do not outsource that crap to the accountant. You get them to show you how it all works, so the knowledge is yours and your finger is on the pulse.

Every business comes back to numbers

The bottom line is this: any business can be broken down to a series of numbers, and those numbers tell you its health and viability. Some are financial, and finance is always in there somewhere. Others are about traction: the size of your audience, how many customers or clients you have, how many people are in your pipeline, your time to close a deal, the lifecycle of a client, and the total lifetime value of a client. Those are just a few, and you should know them off the top of your head. If you do not, go and find them out.

A pitch deck is what crystallises all of this. It puts the numbers in an organised place so that, the moment you need them, for the bank, for forecasting, or for a decision about which way to move, you can recall them in an instant. That is what it means to have that part of your business optimised: you can respond to any situation, or create the one you want, without missing a beat.