Saturday, September 25, 2010

The Purpose Of A Business Is...?

I've been a natural born citizen of the US for over 60 years now. I've been employed, or self-employed in some capacity for over 40 years. When I was in college, I had part-time jobs (often several concurrently), and began full-time employment in 1976. Since then, I've been an employee, self-employed, and had a consulting business with nearly twenty staff members. During that time, it's become clear that the common perception of why businesses exist has changed.

These days it seems most people think the purpose of a business is to provide jobs to people.

It's not.

A business exists to create profits for its owners. Period - finito - end of story.

Some businesses create those profits through employing others, and paying them for their efforts. However, there are many other businesses that have no employees. Most of them are now on the Internet. Some businesses have small numbers of owners, and many others have millions of owners through shares publicly traded on stock exchanges.

Regardless of the form of ownership, or the size of a company, each has been  started for one and only one reason; to make a profit for the owners. Nobody in their right mind starts a business with the main purpose of employing people. Starting a business for any other reason than profit dooms it to failure from the beginning. If profit is not the main reason for your business, then the choices you make as an owner will eventually fail to bring you the money you need to keep the business in existence.

Somehow, Union-ites(*), Democrats, liberal Republicans, and a few other Left Wing Nut Jobs, don't understand this. Clearly the people in the Administration don't get it. Which is why the stimulus is not really working. They're all Academics who've never been in business, let alone owned a business. Until they finally understand this, or surround themselves with business people to whom they will actually listen, EVERY attempt they make to stimulate the economy will fail and waste more of my and your money.

I finally stopped having a small business and went back to being self-employed. It was too risky and too painful to have employees. I was fortunate enough to not have to deal with unions in addition to all the headaches employees provide.

All I can say is I prefer to be self-employed with all those risks, than to be an employer and all the headaches and increased risk that comes from being an employer.


(*)Union-ites: A common precipate of the unfortunately prevalent element Absurdium.

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