Your Business Purpose: Supplier or Consumer?
Last Wednesday, I discussed the idea: profit is not the purpose of business. The post was the first in a sequence about profit. Today, I’ll explore another idea about the purpose of business. A business is a supplier of goods, services and perhaps other things too!
Let’s start with maths. It makes sense for businesses to be suppliers. After all, if the business is a net consumer then it is making a loss. However, business is not so simple. Any product or service has costs attached. It is not unknown to supply something and then discover its costs are greater than the charge attached.
Supplier of Information
The contribution successful businesses make to the economy is their knowledge about how to deliver things at minimal cost. This value triangle, helps us see how it is possible to choose any two out of three positive criteria. You can have a high quality service fast but you will have to pay for it. In this instance, the business passes its costs to the customer. The customer able to wait for the business to find low-cost suppliers, will find the overall cost to be lower.
This holds true for pretty much all businesses. What they do is identify a problem and find a low-cost solution.
The Entrepreneur
The entrepreneur keeps their eyes and ears open. They seek opportunities of potential benefit to their market and deliver them at low cost. They know, for example, how to persuade other businesses to offer their services at low or no cost.
The entrepreneur knows how to bring people together to work on innovative solutions to problems. They educate their contacts by providing opportunities to practice new approaches that solve problems, open up new markets, encourage collaboration and build the local economy. Ideally everyone involved benefits, this mutual benefit is the badge of honour worn by all true entrepreneurs.
Usually, a good story results from the work of entrepreneurs. Do you have any to share?