Business Taboo!

Today I went to the CLD. The CLD is a non-profit organization implemented for the sole purpose of helping the development of entrepreneurs and the local economies. And in our case, we are assigned an adviser, someone who can help us develop a sound business plan and be a sounding board for our ideas. So today, I had my second interview with this adviser.

He brought many good points and has shed good lights on some of the many discrepancies of my business plan. However, during our conversation he asked a simple question: "what guarantees do you have to insure the sale numbers in your business plan?". I had to think about it for a few moments and I started to blurt a bunch of random thoughts on how we came up with the numbers and how sound they were according to "our" experience. Truth be told, I didn't have any guarantees, all I have is confidence, but the question took me a little by surprise.

Which brings me to the point I wanted to make in this blog. Confidence, where does it stem from? I think it comes from a concept that we don't usually associate to business. I think it comes from something we don't like to talk about because it is almost a taboo subject in our society, yet that subject is the driving motor for what we do and how we engage in all parts of our life, whether it be personal, professional or anything for that matter. Confidence stem from FAITH...I know, I know, I know don't roll your eyes yet, or shake your fingers at me or stop reading just yet. Allow me to make my point.

Faith is an important part of starting a business and if I dare say it, it is the basis of what we should start a company. Without it, it would be completely absurd to tackle a project like starting your own company or investing in a company. Why start anything if you don't have faith in the good outcome of your endeavors?

Anyway, I am stating a fact. Every part of our life we exercise faith, sometime at lesser degree than others but we all in some sort of way do. Whether we sit on the dentist chair "trusting" that the dentist knows what she or he is doing to getting in an elevator "hoping" the mechanic did his maintenance job on the wires. We all exercise faith and in business we often hide the word or the feeling with sentences like, "my educated guess" or "in my experience" or "the data suggest"....We all trust a 6th sense. That "6th" sense is simply faith.

So to get back to what my boy the adviser asked: "what guarantees do you have to insure the sale numbers in your business plan?". I don't have any guarantees, all I have is a faith that I did my job and will be doing my job to the best of my abilities and that "Someone" is going to provide.

I am not suggesting that faith is the ONLY thing in business, what I am saying is that without faith there is no point in beginning a business or a project for that matter.