Anheuser Busch (BUD) is rumored to be an acquisition target for InBev (a Belgium company) for $46 Billion dollars!!! There is not many things that are more American than BUD. A few that do come to mind are the auto industry (GM & Ford), baseball, and apple pie.

So I realized something the other day in a meeting…

“If you don’t have a vision every opportunity is strategic”

The lack of a vision is allowing the business to chase every single opportunity regardless of value, probability of win, or strategic importance. This is a waste of time and money, set us on a path and let us execute.

For whatever reason people hate accountability, instead they prefer to come up with some lame ass excuse and people actually allow it and buy it. It amazes me everyday, the crap I see when it comes to accountability. Example, you have a goal of $5 million dollars of new revenue for the company, for this fiscal year. The person agrees to the $5 million dollar goal, then throughout the next 12 months manages to get $3 million or maybe $4.5 million, good job they say to him. Your right good job, your brought in new money but you know what you failed.

This leads me to the bottoms up approach another valuable tool of projecting, estimating or budgeting. We will use our previous examples from the last post. The first was a new killer product in the mobile phone market and the $5M dollar marketing budget example. A bottoms up approach is starting from the base and building it up to come up with some kind of total based upon everything.

First POST, let’s talk finance maybe financial analysis, it’s what I love and something I think I am pretty good at. At some point your boss will probably ask you to do some kind of estimate or projection that involves tons of assumptions, unknown risks, and maybe even the statement “make it work” from the boss man (I have never had a woman boss just like I have never had a woman graduate school professor but I am open to the idea of both).