In business, as in life, it’s all about balance. You need to be able to walk the fine line between too much and not enough in order to achieve success. The trick is not only knowing that you need to balance competing interests in your business, but also realizing when that point of balance has been reached. This is important because when things are in balance, running a profitable shop is a breeze. However, when things are even slightly out of balance, the dangers of losing that profitability start to increase.
What’s more, imbalance tends to breed even more imbalance. This results in the risks of loss increasing exponentially each time things get a little more out of whack. Luckily, it is fairly easy to develop a natural sense of balance when it comes to your business. Let’s take a look at how.
A perfect example of balanced, yet opposing interests are the concepts of risk and responsibility. When you think about it, no two concepts could be more dissimilar. Yet, despite being polar opposites, both risk and responsibility are necessary components of any successful business. In fact, they are so important that both are also necessary components of a successful business mindset.
Every business needs to be able to take risks. There is no way to exploit lucrative market opportunities without incurring some risk. Again, when to move on an opportunity and when to stay put all comes down to balance. If you take too much of risk then the potential downside effects will outweigh the potential benefits of the opportunity.
On the other hand, if you are too cautious about making a move then you lose any head start momentum that you might have gained. In this case, a miscalculation of the risk involved leads to a loss of profit. So how do you correctly balance the amount of risk you assume? The answer is simple; by judiciously using responsibility as a check against that risk.
Responsibility is, in some sense, the flip side of risk. Because it is an opposing force, it helps to keep the instinct to take a risk under control. Responsible behavior exhibits itself almost as a gut feeling. You know when a potential action is probably a step too far without even having to fully examine the consequences. This is the process of balance that we were discussing earlier. The one impulse is countered by the other. The end result is that you achieve you goals by using a little bit of both.