Blogs

Every business makes mistakes. The rare ones admit them fast, fix them at their own cost, and come back stronger. Watching a company on its worst day tells you more about its quality than watching it on its best.

Some companies sell something that is a tiny line on their customer’s bill and a disaster if it fails. That combination — small in cost, large in consequence — quietly does more for a business than any advertisement ever will.

Most sales look like one person handing over money. Very often they are not. Learning to separate the chooser, the user and the payer is one of the simplest ways to judge how solid a company’s demand really is.

Some companies earn almost everything they earn from one product. That is not automatically a weakness, and it is not automatically a strength either. Here is a simple, four-question way to tell the two apart, using nothing more than a plain reading of the annual report.