One of the things that people talk very little about when it comes to running a business is the concept of investing.
People will talk a lot about investing what they take out of the business but much less about what they put into the business; this is a perspective which it seems, at least in our country has seemed to have grown and grown and grown, where people see the purpose of business to take as much money out as possible, to have as lavish a lifestyle as they can.
From my perspective, investment in a business is the only way a business can continue to thrive, let alone survive, and the only way that you can continue to get satisfaction from what you're doing on a day-to-day basis.
One of the great misconceptions about business is that the only way that you can invest in a business is financially and another great misconception is that what you should always do is count the return on investment so that you know if you build a new factory, then it will have to produce these many widgets and you'll make this much money; that's not what a business is, at least not to me.
To me, a business is a fundamental part of society; it allows society to function, produces things that are essential to society, and provides work, purpose, meaning, and, yes, wealth to society.
And so in the first instance, what your business invests financially is critical, both in the infrastructure of the business itself and in the people that you hire and employ, but also in what you're able to put aside for your 'rainy day fund'.
The reason you have a rainy day fund is so that you can pay the wages and maintain the lifestyles of the people that you look after when the times get tough and get difficult (and they will get tough and difficult).
And so if you are that person who strips out of the business as much as he can on a month-by-month basis, you'll have no ability to ride the bumps when the bumps come, and they always come.
The next part of investment though, that you can consider is education and the people that you work with both education and their jobs and education beside their jobs but actually trying to give people the chance to be better at what they do is a joy, it's a really important part of the whole business structure and of the development of the trust and well-being of your team.
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