The Business Is the Business

The Business Is the Business | nik.art

"Craft has golden floors," the saying goes in Germany. Learn a trade, like carpenter, plumber, or baker, and, with patience and wit, you’ll build a thriving business. But it takes so much more than excellent pipework or dry-cleaning skills.

What impressed me most about Georg Meyer, a guy my age who runs his family’s butchery in the fourth generation, was not his knowledge about meats and sausages and cooling and cooking and carving. It was how many numbers he had—and had to have—in his head.

He told my friends and I about revenue, about margins, and about shift durations. He explained he needs to calculate worker holidays, volumes on ingredients by the season, profits and losses on an item-basis, and so much more. "Running this business is more about numbers than anything else," I thought.

To someone like Meyer, AI is actually useful, even in its simplest chatbot-form. The data is all there. The cooling house records temperatures. Scales record weights. The filling robot measures the sausage down to the gram. And while a data scientist is far too expensive for a local Nuremberg butchery, a ChatGPT subscription is not. "I can run the numbers, and it’ll tell me when’s the best time to smoke the meet, when I can expect to have less demand for pork filets, and which products I might want to consider removing." And that’s just operations.

From accounting to credit volumes to historical revenue trends, Meyer has become a one-person finance department, again partially thanks to AI, and if he wasn’t, the business might have crumbled years ago. The shop is large, the numbers sound—but it’s still a butchery, not a software startup. Margins range in the single digits, and there’s not much room for catastrophe. One project financing gone sideways can come with heavy consequences.

"I don’t think you can build up a shop like ours in a single generation anymore," Meyer told our group. "It used to be possible, but now? The permits, the regulations, never mind the prices of land, buildings, and machines. Sourcing the meat is complicated, and by that point you haven’t actually made a single sausage." Meyer’s top-selling item is potato salad made with meat broth. By volume, he sells more sausages and meat, of course. But no matter how tasty all of those are, in the end, none of it works if the numbers don’t.

Having run my own business full-time before, I remembered: The business is the business. Making a great product or service is merely the entry ticket. But without marketing, sales, operations, legal, finance, and a slew of other responsibilities, even the best potato salad won’t survive.

The good thing about business is that it’s just like craft: learnable. A set of tools and skills anyone can acquire if they put in the effort—and without effort, nothing, not even the most profitable trade, will have golden floors.

Nik

Niklas Göke writes for dreamers, doers, and unbroken optimists. A self-taught writer with more than a decade of experience, Nik has published over 2,000 articles. His work has attracted tens of millions of readers and been featured in places like Business Insider, CNBC, Lifehacker, and many others.

Nik has self-published 2 books thus far, most recently 2-Minute Pep Talks. Outside of his day job and daily blog, Nik loves reading, video games, and pizza, which he eats plenty a slice of in Munich, Germany, where he resides.

Search for:

The Business Is the Business

Related Articles

(no title)

Scientists reverse brain aging, with a nasal spray

AI has torched the market for junior programmers

Al Vigier: Canada's AI strategy shouldn't include secret Palantir bills

The Anatomy of an AI-Native Org