The Laws of Business

20. The Law of Purpose
21. The Law of Organization
22. The Law of Customer Satisfaction
23. The Law of the Customer
24. The Law of Quality
25. The Law of Obsolescence
26. The Law of Innovation
27. The Law of Critical Success Factors
28. The Law of the Market
29. The Law of Specialization
30. The Law of Differentiation
31. The Law of Segmentation
32. The Law of Concentration
33. The Law of Excellence

President Calvin Coolidge once said, "The business of America is business." Most of your opportunities for great success in life will come in owning or working for a private business organization. The sooner you learn the laws of business and harmonize your activities with them, the more you will be paid and the faster you will be promoted.

There are more than 23 million businesses in the United States today. Somewhere between 600,000 and 1,000,000 new businesses are being incorporated each year, in addition to hundreds of thousands of sole proprietorships and partnerships that are not registered. These businesses are of every conceivable size and structure, from the single individual working from his or her kitchen table to the largest corporate organization employing hundreds of thousands of people.

Our business system is very much a part of our way of life. Your ability to understand how this amazing system works is essential to your achieving all that is possible for you in our society. This knowledge can help you to be far more successful than people who never take the time to learn.

The rate of change today in business is incredible, and if anything, it is accelerating. Companies are emerging from nowhere, growing rapidly, going public at values of billions of dollars, and then going out of business or being taken over all in a matter of a few short years. We have never seen anything like it before. This incredible rate of change is the one unavoidable and inevitable fact of modern business life.

Each year, as many as 100 companies join or fall off the list of the 500 largest companies in America. Many other corporate giants are either broken up, merged, or acquired or change their
major line of business. Everywhere we see huge mergers and mega-mergers that are transforming the world of business and affecting the lives of millions of people.

When we experience this much turbulence amongst the largest and most powerful corporations in the country, you can imagine the kind of turbulence that is being experienced amongst the millions of smaller companies.

Fully 80 percent of new businesses close down or disappear within the first two years of start-up, and many large, established companies go bankrupt or are taken over by other organizations
every year.

At the same time, thousands of new companies succeed and many larger companies grow at tremendous rates, despite their sizes. This rate of change means that there are unlimited opportunities for the creative minority, the ones who know the laws of business success. By applying these laws and principles, you increase your ability to make a significant contribution to your organization. You put your life and your career onto the fast track.
You make more progress in a couple of years than many people make in their entire careers.

I began learning these principles many years ago. My business career began when I started selling soap for the local YMCA at the age of ten. From there I went on to selling newspapers, lawnmowing services, and Christmas trees. I worked in a department store as a stock clerk. I later sold office supplies door-to-door and then went on to selling mutual funds, real estate, automobiles, advertising, training, and consulting. I have worked for, sold for, and managed twenty-two organizations of various sizes over the course of more than twenty-five years. I’ve seen both exciting successes and spectacular failures.

When I was thirty-one, even though I had failed to graduate from high school, I applied for and was accepted into an Executive MBA program at a large university, largely on the basis of my life experiences. For three solid years of evenings, weekends, summers, and two full-time semesters, I put my head down and waded through undergraduate and graduate courses in every facet of business and business management. I came out the other end with a head full of theoretical knowledge and an eagerness to apply some of those ideas to the real world.

Then I had one of the luckiest breaks of my life. I was invited to work as the personal consultant to the chairman of a $500 million conglomerate. By applying some of the laws and principles contained in this chapter, I set up, managed, operated, and generated tens of millions of dollars in sales of various products and services. At every stage of this phase of my business career, the chairman guided me with the advice and insights that had enabled him to
become one of the richest and most respected men in the country.

Three years later, I was hired away at triple the salary plus stock options to become the chief operating officer of a $265 million development company. In that position, I applied many of the lessons I’d learned at the knee of the chairman. As a result, I was able to reorganize, redirect, and restaff the company completely within six months.

During this reorganization, I learned a vital principle of business: Any kind of rapid change in a business disrupts the existing power structure, and people will fight viciously to preserve their perks and positions, even to the detriment of the organization. No matter what they say or recommend, people do not like change or change agents. I became the victim of a "palace coup" and soon found myself back on the street, looking for another job.

Over the years, I have seen many kinds of businesses, from the best thought out to the most ridiculous. I have worked with virtually every kind of businessperson, from the most accomplished and skillful to the most foolish and self-deluded. I’ve read hundreds of books and thousands of articles on various aspects of business and business management, and I still believe that I am only scratching the surface.

Nonetheless, I’ve developed a few guidelines that have been instrumental in enabling me to build successful businesses of my own. I have also been able to help many of my clients dramatically improve their rates of growth, their market share, and their profitability.

Several laws apply specifically to any business. Your practicing just one of these laws where you may not have in the past can make all the difference to your long-term success. These laws are proven, practical, simple, and effective. Like a treadmill, the more often you use them, the better results you will get.

Source: Brian Tracy, The 100 Absolutely Unbreakable Laws of Business Success, 2000.