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Some businesses make a hundred small decisions a day and learn by evening which ones were wrong. Others make one enormous decision and wait twenty years for the answer. Both can be run by honest, capable people — but they ask completely different things of you as an owner.

Almost every company sells a few things that do well and a long list of things that barely move. The surprise is that the accounts usually show the whole list making money — because of the way ordinary cost accounting spreads shared expenses. Here is how to see past that.

A rule almost a hundred years old says a business gets cheaper the more times it has done the work — not the more it makes this year. The difference decides whether a richer rival can catch up. It is also the most over-claimed advantage in business, so half of today's letter is about checking it.

Most suppliers have to win the sale all over again every time. A few are written into the customer's own paperwork, and after that the customer has to do the work of removing them. That difference is one of the quietest advantages in business, and it leaves a paper trail you can actually look for.