What are the criteria for judging successful business development?

I will not be mistaken if I write that every entrepreneur is asleep and sees how to improve the work of his enterprise, so to say “deepen” it and “expand” it. But almost everyone has his own vision of this process … Not everyone can clearly articulate by what indicators one can judge how successful the enterprise has become.

Terms, terms, terms … When communicating with entrepreneurs, you often notice that there is no single “picture of the worlds” between a consultant and a customer when discussing both complex and tricky and fairly simple questions. And even more so, it concerns the terminology … In the economy, as I wrote earlier, there is a certain confusion with the terms. Everyone, to the best of reading the economic literature, understands this or that term in its own way.

For the sake of experiment, I wanted to do a little research, and to understand for myself how our citizens, just yesterday were engineers and scientists, and today, by the will of fate, who became entrepreneurs, in the post-perestroika era, belong to such new and unusual concepts or terms? How has their mind and mindset changed? What does the expression “capitalism in Russian” mean in the end? To tell the truth … taking on this little research, I really didn’t know how these well-known and unfamiliar words and phrases are perceived in my city.

Having started calling around “congenial” businessmen, the author was somewhat surprised by the fact that almost all businessmen (with rare exceptions) cannot clearly and clearly answer the question, so what is “capitalism”. If you ask an ordinary Rostovite, what is “capitalism”, then every second will answer you that this is private ownership of the means of production. With businessmen, the statistics are about the same. However, it turned out that some do not even have these very means of production, but they earn well. It turns out that our Russian businessmen are vaguely aware of the “fact” that during the third decade we have been trying to “build” from perestroika times to our bright days, when capitalism has already given a serious crack and before our eyes, its dismantling is in full swing .

The situation was even worse with decoding the phrase “business development”. Just by the concept by which you can track the positive or negative dynamics of the functioning of the business as such. Some, convinced me that “business development” is when … you abruptly “rise.” Others were confident that when … “every year,” bubble “more and more.” Still others, on the move, expressed no less extravagant ideas.

Let’s try together to figure out what is the development of the company? I found several semantic definitions, combining which may be able to help us sort out this issue:

Development is an irreversible directional regular change of objects, as a result of which their new qualitative state arises …

Business is an entrepreneurial activity carried out with own or borrowed funds at its own risk and under its own responsibility, setting profit and development as its main objectives …
Based on these definitions, we can assume that “the development of an enterprise (business)” is an irreversible change in the object (enterprise), as a result of which its qualitative and quantitative indicators change.

Moreover, as the logic prompts, “changes” should have “positive dynamics”. Let’s try to figure out what this is – “company growth”. In this regard, I recall the wonderful American film “Wall Street”, which shows the work of the speculative stock market in America in the mid-eighties (who have not seen, I recommend to watch).

The phrase of the protagonist (Bud Fox) when discussing the prospects of an American airline has a direct relationship to our topic. And, he said the following: “we will do this and that (we will cut wages and costs) and the airline will immediately grow.” A symbolic phrase, I would say, the meaning of which lies in the fact that while reducing costs, no matter what, the company’s profit should increase … So, at least, it should be in life if the company is not unprofitable (for this period of time).

Consequently, if this airline is a joint stock company, then the value of its shares, naturally, should rush upwards. How much will its cost increase? This is another question. I don’t know how it is in America, and Russia, where the securities market is incommensurably small, compared with the so-called “developed countries”, to make such predictions is, of course, possible and necessary, only very often they do not come true for various reasons, reasons rather “political”, not having any relation to the business. But we got a little distracted …